A federal judge recently ruled that the massive Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind (CVOW) program must be allowed to proceed despite Trump administration attempts to kill the project on national security grounds for interference with coastal radar defense systems.
Was that really the strongest rationale to end this costly scheme - one of the most expensive energy projects in U.S. history?
Not likely.
More cogent reasons for opposition are the project's unwarranted burdens on Virginia energy consumers and U.S. taxpayers falsely premised on "affordability."
Virginia’s State Corporation Commission approved the CVOW project in 2022 under mandate of the Virginia Clean Energy Act of 2020 which required its main utility, Dominion Energy, to be carbon-free within a quarter-century.
The Act specifically required that a Virginia utility build the wind farm rather than import the wind energy from an adjacent state.
Although the State Corporation Commission originally understood that that the project would raise the average consumer's bill by more than $50 a year and as much as $170 in some years, with a special fee specifically added to Virginians' energy bills for offshore wind, they nevertheless became shocked at what that electricity would cost.
Their conclusion, "the electricity produced by this Project will be among the most expensive sources of power" in the U.S., whether measured by total capacity created or by actual electricity delivered.
“They additionally noted that at more than $20 billion, CVOW is also the "costliest project being undertaken by a regulated utility in the United States."
Construction alone is expected to cost about $10 billion, with financing and other long-term costs doubling more than doubling the total price tag.
As the state notes, "all of these costs . . . will find their way to ratepayers' electric bills."
And this spending largess doesn't account for billions in federal tax credits for the project provided by taxpayers across the nation.
Dominion Energy claims that CVOW will reduce customers' bills by shrinking the amount of outside renewable energy the utility will need to purchase under state law.
However, this circular argument ignores reality that it is state law that mandated their purchase of costly "renewable" green energy in the first place with no thanks to the Virginia Clean Energy Act which has mandated that several far more economical fossil fuel generators be shut down.
Since Dominion Energy will own CVOW directly, their energy dependent customers will also bear added supply cost risks if the project fails economically, whereas other utilities have promised to buy power from
independent offshore wind companies.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), offshore wind is already the most expensive primary type of energy available, more than twice the cost per megawatt hour of onshore wind and 3.4 times more expensive than power produced by natural gas plants, even without factoring in special tax credits.
Since Virginia's offshore winds are weak, even Dominion has noted that the project would typically produce less than half its full power capacity.
Nor can wind farms produce seasonal weather-independent reliable power when needed, instead generating the most electricity in spring and fall when demand is lowest, and the least in summer afternoons when demand is highest.
Because wind power by its fundamental nature is intermittent, extra costs of providing backup standby generation capacity (typically gas-fired plants) come as a requirement to stabilize the grid, made more expensive by a need to inefficiently throttle the turbines up and down in a similar manner to repeatedly starting and stopping a car in heavy traffic.
Since modern societies require around-the-clock power depending in this case upon two systems, renewables and reliable backup, this leaves a need to always have a ready supply of mostly natural gas turbines on hand to make up the difference, although operating at low efficiency and profit margin costs for suppliers who are forced to charge more.
Ironically, it's often cheaper and more reliable to run natural gas plants continuously.
Gas plants last longer too, with typical useful operating lives of 30-40 years compared with 20-24 years for offshore wind turbines.
Theres little wonder then why President Trump would deem to end this government- subsidized energy economy-ravaging folly which he referred to along with solar in a social media post as "the scam of the century."
Speaking at the World Economic Forum (WEF), Trump said, "There are windmills all over Europe," "There are windmills all over the place, and they are losers.
"One thing I've noticed is that the more windmills a country has, the more money that country loses and the worse that country is doing."
Take Germany, for example, which pays more than twice the U.S. price, and three times more than China pays per kilowatt hour for electricity.
Simultaneously, Germany has installed enough solar and wind power to supply nearly 70% of its electricity needs with a huge caveat. . . .
It excludes cloudy and windless days as have occurred twice in recent months when these "renewables" delivered less than 4% of daily power requirements.
And Germany's entire emergency battery storage is limited to about 20 minutes.
In any case, whatever the outcome of the legal cases surrounding the Trump administration and CVOW, pausing the project won't lower energy costs for Virginians at this point because the state regulator has already baked them into the bill.
The only thing "green" about this energy legislation will come out of pockets of Virginia ratepayers and U.S. taxpayers.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is "Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design" (2022). Read more Larry Bell Insider articles — Click Here Now.
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