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US blocks all offshore wind construction, says reason is classified

arstechnica.com

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Re: US blocks all offshore wind construction, says reason is classified

#371

Post by pbhjpbhj »

alphazard wrote: post #168
tony_cannistra wrote: post #21

I looked into this a little because I was curious. I guess the ostensible "national security" rationale (which clearly is not the only reason!) for this is that turbines severely degrade the utility of radar surveillance along the coastlines. This is particularly relevant for low-altitude incursions and drones. Now, other large governments (UK) have resolved this in several ways, including the deployment of additiona…

Bringing up a map of wind power deployments tells the story; what you will see is a hot vertical strip in the center of the US. That is where it actually makes sense to deploy windmills, and people will continue to put them there even if subsidies end. It makes sense for the area, the amount of wind, the serviceability of the deployments, etc. Off shore has always been politically contentious because it's much more d…

Why do you say it's rent seeking? Offshore wind is efficient, turbine blades can safely be much larger giving 3x the output, turbine arrays have unobstructed space giving twice the capacity factor. It's more efficient than onshore.

You appear to be starting from a premise that wind turbines don't generate profits?

Re: US blocks all offshore wind construction, says reason is classified

#373

Post by benregenspan »

brandensilva wrote: post #348
beembeem wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Result first (kill anything not carbon-based), find rationale later. Same applies to how this admin forced layoffs at the green energy (hydro + nuclear) behemoth BPA [1] (which was funded entirely by ratepayers, not the federal government) then claimed an energy emergency to keep open coal plants serving the same geographies, coal plants that were already uneconomical and planned for shut down (or re-tooling to gas i…

Boggles my mind a bit given much of the oil companies own the new renewable tech too. Why not keep investing in the future.

They might be the "wrong" oil companies. (In the case of Empire Wind, the administration is probably at best indifferent about screwing over the Norwegian state oil company.)

Re: US blocks all offshore wind construction, says reason is classified

#375

Post by jandrewrogers »

stevage wrote: post #248
the__alchemist wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea... I don't trust the motivations, but can confirm that on AA radars looking low (Where you might find UAS or just low-flying aircraft), wind farms show up as clusters of false hits.

But if they're just false hits it's easy to filter them out, right?

It is more difficult than you may be assuming. How do you know the hits are false? These "hits" are collections of samples at points in time, not continuous tracks. The "tracks" are reconstructed by making inferences from the samples.

Determining whether any pair of sequential samples represents the same entity or two unrelated entities is an extremely difficult inference problem with no closed or general solution. If there is too much clutter, it becomes almost unresolvable. Aliasing will create a lot of false tracks.

History has shown that any heuristic you use to filter the clutter will be used by your adversary as an objective function to hide from your sensors once they know you are using it (e.g. doppler radar "notching").

For this reason the inference algorithms are classified but they will degrade rapidly with sufficient clutter no matter how clever. It is a limitation of the underlying mathematics.

Re: US blocks all offshore wind construction, says reason is classified

#376

Post by calmbonsai »

tony_cannistra wrote: post #21

I looked into this a little because I was curious. I guess the ostensible "national security" rationale (which clearly is not the only reason!) for this is that turbines severely degrade the utility of radar surveillance along the coastlines. This is particularly relevant for low-altitude incursions and drones. Now, other large governments (UK) have resolved this in several ways, including the deployment of additiona…

Yep. I worked with France's EDF on their offshore turbines https://www.edf.fr/en/the-edf-group/inventing-the-future-of-... .

This rationale by the U.S. is total BS.

Re: US blocks all offshore wind construction, says reason is classified

#377

Post by stephen_g »

simonsarris wrote: post #253
linuxhansl wrote: post #29

What the... It seems we crossed into the realm of intentionally doing damage. I'm reminded of threatening tariffs to successfully derail global carbon levy on ship emissions. Meanwhile China runs away with all the clean energy tech (solar, wind, batteries, etc, etc.) while we hold to fossil fuels to save less than 200,000 jobs.

I hope you realize that China's coal and oil use for electricity is at an all-time high and increasing. They have installed more coal capacity since 2020 than the US has total. US coal usage peaked circa 2000 and has decreased for the last 2 decades. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...

New coal data is out just a few days ago [1], it's plateaued globally and expected to start to decline.

China's consumption this year was about the same as last, and looking to drop a bit, so likely old coal plants were being retired at about the same rate as newer ones were built, and that will start to go the other way (more retired than built).

1. https://www.iea.org/news/global-coal-demand-has-reached-a-pl...

Re: US blocks all offshore wind construction, says reason is classified

#378

Post by ben_w »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #320
Forgeties79 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With something as serious as a nuclear reactor, I am OK with over regulation.

But why not same scrutiny for coal?

Correct operation of a coal plant has global impact, and therefore coal should be phased out entirely.

Absent that, when a coal plant goes badly wrong, the damage is small enough and localised enough to be affordable.

When a nuclear plant goes wrong, the upper bound for error includes both Chrenobyl and also "unknown parties stole the radioisotopes" followed by terrorists repeating the Goiânia accident somewhere.

Making all the failure modes not happen is expensive.

Re: US blocks all offshore wind construction, says reason is classified

#380

Post by dzhiurgis »

ben_w wrote: post #378
dzhiurgis wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why not same scrutiny for coal?

Correct operation of a coal plant has global impact, and therefore coal should be phased out entirely. Absent that, when a coal plant goes badly wrong, the damage is small enough and localised enough to be affordable. When a nuclear plant goes wrong, the upper bound for error includes both Chrenobyl and also "unknown parties stole the radioisotopes" followed by terrorists repeating the Goiânia accident somewhere. Mak…

But one is enforced (nuclear security) and coal is not.

p.s. ICE cars are literally spewing cancer fumes right into kids faces. 0 fucks given. If anything people try to frame EVs as actual devil.

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