The Biden administration earlier this month approved the construction of 195 wind turbines with the closest just nine miles off the southern New Jersey coastline, prompting an uproar from residents in coastal towns.
As the Biden administration and other environmental activist groups boast that the Atlantic Shores South project, nearly nine years in the making, is another milestone in the nation’s green energy harvest, a former U.S. Department of Energy engineer raises alarm bells that not only is this project harmful to tourism, the ocean ecosystem, but it will actually increase energy costs by up to 80% over the next 20 years.
The company behind the project, Atlantic Shores Offshore Wind, LLC (Atlantic Shores), has three different leases totaling more than 400 square miles with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. There are plans for two separate projects with two leases located off the Jersey Shore between Atlantic City and Barnegat Light and the third lease located in an area of the Atlantic Ocean known as the Bight.
“Project 1 and Project 2 are expected to produce up to 2,800 megawatts of electricity, enough to power nearly one million homes with clean renewable energy,” according to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.
And while Atlantic Shores South says this project will generate $1.9 billion in economic benefits for the Garden State, an analysis by Edward P. O’Donnell with Whitestrand Consulting found that consumers from residents to advertising to industry across the state will see a massive growth. on their electricity bills.
“Offshore wind is not economically viable without large subsidies in the form of federal tax credits and guaranteed market prices for the energy produced,” the analysis said. “The former is passed on to US taxpayers, while the latter is a cost borne by NJ ratepayers. Additionally, accommodating the transmission of large amounts of offshore wind energy in and through NJ requires major investments in improving and expanding the state’s transmission system.”
Construction of Project 1 is expected to begin in 2024 and deliver its first power in 2027, bringing the Biden administration just one step closer to deploying 30 gigawatts of offshore power by 2030, drawing praise from groups environmental groups such as the Sierra Club.
“We are proud to see New Jersey move toward renewable energy and offshore wind development, and away from dirty fossil fuels,” Sierra Club New Jersey Director Anjuli Ramos-Busot said in a statement. “New Jersey’s offshore wind momentum is only growing as we continue to lead the region in our transition to a cleaner, greener future for our communities.”
The company claims that Project 1 alone will see New Jersey’s greenhouse gas emissions decrease by 4 million tons annually, create nearly 50,000 jobs, generate $1.9 billion in total economic benefits and generate enough clean energy to supplied energy to 700,000 homes.
However, Dr. Bob Stern, a former engineer with the US Department of Energy and 25-year resident of Long Beach Island, said these statistics about how many homes these windmills will supply are extremely misleading.
“It’s an intermittent resource,” Stern said. “I see these statements and they’re carefully crafted, like you can see a statement that says, ‘this project has the potential to power 10,000 homes,’ and it gives people the impression that this project is going to power all of them by itself. house. This is not correct because the estimate is that it will only be functional 40 percent of the time, so really if you are looking at your home’s energy throughout the year, this project can’t do it on its own.
Even Orsted, a renewable energy sustainability company, states that with offshore wind there will always be “flexibility to use other sources, such as onshore wind, sustainable biomass, solar power and large-scale battery storage , to help balance the grid and ensure the lights can always stay on.”
Orsted even mentions that when there is a lot of wind, those offshore turbines are only effective 1% of the time.
With the analysis, O’Donnell takes into account New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy’s plan to have 11,000 megawatts of offshore wind by 2040. That means federal investment tax subsidies will total more than $20 billion. , which is small compared to the costs that will be incurred. to expand the generation and transmission system to move all that power off the coast and into the PJM grid.
“These rate subsidies will exceed $100 billion over 20 years and will increase customer electricity rates by 55%, 70% and 85% for residential, commercial and industrial customers,” the report said.
To put this in perspective, a ratepayer paying 16 cents/kwhr would see that price double to over 32 cents/kwhr, which would increase their annual bill by $1,000 by 2047. This would affect to consumers across the state.
As disturbing as it is for Stern to see his electric bills go up, he is concerned about how this green energy project will affect marine animals like whales.
“Underwater noise from all phases of this, ship surveys using sounding equipment to characterize the seabed, then the noise from when you pile the foundations and then the operation of these large structures creates a lot of underwater noise.” Stern said. “We’ve looked at it extensively and we believe it’s going to cause great harm to whales, dolphins, especially whales that have to migrate to New Jersey to get to where they’re going.”
But according to Stern, it gets worse as commercial, military and fishing vessel traffic will not be allowed at the wind farm.
“So they’re going to be squeezed into these narrow corridors,” Stern said. “And it turns out that the corridors they’re going to be squeezed into also happen to be a migration corridor for whales. Now you are creating, not only a danger to whales, but a danger to ships.”
In the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s Environmental Review, the agency acknowledged that the South Atlantic coast would have a major impact on the North Atlantic White Whale, of fewer than 400 left in the wild.
Stern, who organized Save Long Beach Island in an effort to push the project, said there is also a fear among community members that the windmills, a major eyesore just miles offshore, will negatively affect tourism.
The Long Beach Island Chamber of Commerce said in an email it opposed the project but declined to comment.
“What are we doing this for?” Stern said. “People come out and say we have to do this for climate change, but even the agency documents say it has a negligible impact on climate change because there’s a much bigger dynamic going on out there with the rest of the world .”
Stern, along with his friends at Save Long Island Beach, are not giving up and said they will take this to court.
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“This is an energy cheat,” Stern said. “Unfortunately, it is also a dangerous scam and I believe the country will regret it.”
of Washington Examiner contacted the Bureau of Ocean Management and Atlantic Shores for comment.
