David Blackmon's fantastic overview of Secretary Chris Wright's Energy Policy Criteria

David Blackmon is a long-time friend, going back to the early days of the Barnett Shale boom. He has graciously spoken many times to my energy classes at TCU. David is an excellent writer, including multiple popular Substacks. This morning, David published a great piece comparing offshore wind to Energy Secretary Chris Wright’s energy policy criteria. He encouraged his readers to share it with others, so I wanted to share it with my readers. If you don’t subscribe to one or more of David’s Substacks, you should. You can find them here and here.

Meghan Lapp: Offshore Wind vs Secretary Wright’s Energy Policy Criteria

Note: Readers here will remember Meghan Lapp, outstanding advocate for the Northeast Atlantic marine fisheries industry, whom I’ve interviewed several times on my podcast. Here is her bio:

With familial roots in Long Island, New York, Ms. Lapp grew up around the fishing industry. Ms. Lapp holds a Masters in Legal Science from Queens University Belfast. She is an active voice in fisheries management, regularly attending Council meetings and currently works as an industry representative for Seafreeze Ltd. Additionally, Ms. Lapp was a participant in United We Fish (2010) rally in Washington D.C.

She is also a children’s book author and has published two books: Fast Friends and Hello, Stranger!, which feature the adventures and friendship of ferry boats in Fire Island, New York. She lives in Narragansett, Rhode Island.]

Following President Trump’s January 20^th inauguration, one of the first Cabinet confirmation hearings I listened to was that of Secretary of Energy Chris Wright. Multiple times throughout that hearing, Secretary Wright stated that U.S. energy needed to be three things: reliable, affordable, and secure. Offshore wind is none of these things; in fact, it is the opposite of all three.

Since the Department of Energy is one of the agencies tapped by President Trump’s Day One Executive Order “Temporary Withdrawal of All Areas on the Outer Continental Shelf from Offshore Wind Leasing and Review of the Federal Government’s Leasing and Permitting Practices for Wind Projects” to aid in the Department of Interior review of currently permitted or leased offshore wind projects, it will be critical that the Secretary of Energy take a hard look at how the previous Biden Administration review of existing offshore leases and projects not only ignored reliability, affordability and national security, but actually buried these concerns, to the detriment of the nation.

Let’s take a look at each of Secretary Wright’s three criteria and how offshore wind measures up- the third might surprise you:

1. Reliable: Offshore wind is not a reliable, long-lived, or dispatchable source of power. In 2023 for the first time, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) identified “Energy Policy”, i.e. the reliance on renewables, for the first time as a risk to the stability of the continental grid, which obviously has serious consequences on reliability.

The intermittency of offshore wind power is a well-known fact; what is not as well known is that the more offshore wind is built, the less effective it becomes. As offshore wind farms grow larger and more numerous, energy production actually drops due to the wind wake effects from turbine to turbine, causing as much as a 20% drop in power production for wind farms within 50 km of each other and up to 28.9% within a wind farm itself, lowering energy production and efficiency, and requiring more backup power.

Wind droughts are common in Europe, causing astronomical electricity price spikes and putting consumers at risks of blackouts and exposure to freezing temperatures due to European reliance on offshore wind power. As recently as January 2025, U.K. households faced blackouts as wind power plummeted due to freezing weather; in 2021 due to a lack of wind German authorities taught the public to heat their homes with candles and cook without electricity.

In the U.S., projects cannot be built if they face simple performance guarantees. An offshore wind developer’s project off Virginia claimed it would average a 42% capacity factor of energy production, but when regulators suggested a performance guarantee based on a 42% three year rolling average capacity factor in order to protect ratepayers from unexpected cost increases, the developer immediately responded saying that such a performance guarantee would force them to “terminate” the project.

Offshore wind is so unreliable that developers are not even willing to enter into performance guarantees based off of their own numbers. Offshore wind is highly exposed to the elements, more so than onshore wind, resulting in rapid degradation of project components and decreased output over time. On average, offshore wind farm power output declines by 4.5% annually, losing nearly 50% of its power output within 10 years of construction.

Reliable? No.

2. Affordable: Offshore wind has the highest levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) of any power source, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. However, when the intermittency of offshore wind power (not considered by LCOE) is factored into the equation, costs soar even higher.

In New England, one analysis put the all-in cost of offshore wind power up to 12 times that of natural gas.

Offshore wind cannot survive without massive subsidies, whether in the U.S. or elsewhere. When Denmark, one of the foremost nations promoting offshore wind, decided to forgo subsidies for offshore wind in 2024, it received zero bids on its offshore wind lease auction. The same occurred in the U.K. in 2023.

In the U.S., the Inflation Reduction Act currently provides a 30% Investment Tax Credit for the capital cost of offshore wind projects, with additional tax subsidies allowing projects to be subsidized up to 50% of costs. The capital cost of unreliable offshore wind being subsidized is nearly 6 times that of reliable combined cycle natural gas, with twice the operations and maintenance costs, according to one developer.

Even with massive subsidies from U.S. taxpayers to “offset” these costs, offshore wind companies in recent years have continually canceled U.S. contracts and rebid these same contracts at higher electricity rates to consumers. The cost of offshore wind is going up, not down.

Affordable? No.

3. Secure: Offshore wind directly interferes with national defense and maritime security, thereby posing actual security risks. In 2022, the U.S. Navy stated that the entirety of BOEM’s planned offshore wind leases in the Central Atlantic would impact its missions and in 2017 had ruled the majority of the East Coast a “Wind Exclusion Zone”- including areas currently leased and permitted for offshore wind development.

In 2019, the Undersecretary of Defense acknowledged that U.S. long range air surveillance radar is “very susceptible” to interference from offshore wind turbines and that submarines could possibly also be affected. The DOD and BOEM have stated that terminal area air traffic control radar, defense long range air surveillance radars, weather radars, ground based military unique radars, and missile tracking radars will all be impacted by offshore wind.

Wind turbines cause clutter and false targets on radar, causing actual targets to be missed and/or masked; the interference increases with the size and number of turbines. In 2016, the federal interagency Wind Turbine Radar Interference Mitigation Working Group released their first “strategy” to “fully address by 2025” the radar interference caused by wind turbines. They have found no solutions, only discovered more radar related problems, and have since extended “the timeline to accomplish the objectives of the 2016 strategy…to 2035”.

Meanwhile, these important federal agencies like the DOD, FAA and USCG routinely defer to BOEM (which permits offshore wind projects) as the “lead agency” on all offshore wind permitting issues, leaving critical security issues including radar interference to take a back seat to offshore wind development. One offshore wind farm scheduled for imminent construction is not only directly sited on a USCG Weapons Training Area but will also interfere with JFK Airport’s air surveillance radar on the approach to N.Y.- which BOEM admits will “allow aircraft to hide within these false targets, making detection of an aircraft difficult while over the wind farm.”

The recent N.J./N.Y. drone activity highlights the importance of preserving radar integrity. In 2024, Sweden rejected 13 offshore wind projects in the Baltic Sea because the wind farm radar interference would reduce Sweden’s missile defense system detection time by half and made submarine detection more difficult. In 2024, Estonia also declared that offshore wind installations pose security threats for Estonia and NATO, with radar interference creating a “barrier” to military operations affecting both combat units and rescue operations, impacting drone detection and missile launches.

At sea, the USCG has already been forced to abort one helicopter search and rescue mission that resulted in loss of life partially due to “hazards in the area (i.e. wind farm),” and the USCG to this day has still not conducted any evaluation of marine radar interference on its own vessel or mission capabilities despite the fact that its vessels will experience marine radar interference due to offshore wind turbines. In 2022, the National Academies of Sciences released a report entitled, ““Wind Turbine Generator Impacts to Marine Vessel Radar”, which confirmed that wind turbine interference “decreases the effectiveness of [marine vessel radar] mounted on all vessel classes, and the sizes of anticipated marine [wind] farms across the U.S. OCS will exacerbate this situation” and offered no immediate solutions, only suggestions for future study.

Secure? No.

Hopefully, all these issues will be noticed by Secretary Wright’s Department of Energy offshore wind review pursuant to President Trump’s Executive Order. They are big issues, and ones that should have precluded U.S. offshore wind leasing and development in the first place. The good thing is it’s not too late to reverse course.

[End]

Please share this piece far and wide - that’s why I did not put it behind a paywall.

Also, if you know people inside DOI and DOE, please forward it to them. Thanks.

That is all.

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