Big Day in Offshore Wind

The good news is Virginia is now Fed-approved going ahead with a massive offshore wind project.
The reason why: Virginia wants to pay full cost (ratepayers on the hook ) to take the lead. The towers made-in-Germany are arriving now. These will be big ~15MW turbines.

The bad news is apparent mass extinction of the other northeast offshore wind projects, which were low cost bid, and ORSTED is not able to honor. South Fork NY (12 turbines) still going, and the New England project is under construction .

https://www.inquirer.com/science/orsted-new-jersey-offshore-wind-ocean-wind-20231031.html

 

There is not much experience with these huge new 12MW+ turbines being constructed on the East Coast. That will be one risk factor. I heard from advocates that China has a lot of offshore wind, I'd ask turbine size?

Perhaps hurricane winds are not so bad to design for, apparently the tornados that hurricanes spawn is strictly an over-land phenomenon due to structures. As long as the turbines themselves do no cause that, we'll be OK?

Our utilities tend to be state-run monopolies, who are guaranteed to be paid back for project costs and will get good profits guaranteed on the power generated, so that means the States are gun-ho for new power plants, and cost is no object sometimes.
Perhaps this scenario has already resulted in high electric costs in the Northeast, so they were trying to control costs with low-cost bids that flopped. Virginia has fairly low elec cost (fairly high elec usage as we have relatively more heat pumps vs. gas heat) so I guess elected officials figured we could afford this, perhaps a little like Georgia opting for mega-expensive new nukes.