posted this at ars forum: (it should be clear I think it was a stupid move by the WH, but I am trying to think what might have "informed" it)
Steelmanning the risks, its the link to mainland as a weakness in supply chain of power, compared to onshore sources possibly. But, the construction is in close water, well inside the exclusive economic zone. You would think passage of a craft capable of causing a power shock with an anchor chain was raising hackles well before this, because it's hugely unusual for a warcraft of another nation to be that close without an explicit permit. Under the Jones act, all inshore commercial craft delivering goods to and from named ports have to be US badged, for international shipping it's clear from the baltic there's a concrete risk, but that's a matter of policing the boats, not banning the structures at risk.
A second steelman might be some belief about the intermittency. Thats easily knocked over because the system as a whole is building out storage and continuity systems, is adapting to a mix of technology with different power availability throughout the day, and of all the sources of power, wind is one of the most easily predicted to a useful window forward. You know roughly when a dunkelflaut is expected inside 48h, if you don't know exactly when, or for how long. Thats well north of the spin-up time for alternative (dirty) sources of power, if your storage capacity isn't there yet to handle it.
The Judges appear to have responded to something specific. If it was made-up, they would have thrown the case out harder and sanctioned whoever submitted false evidence. So I assume somebody with an ability to legally bind intel into the right form was persuaded to say something.
Perhaps the objection started out with something fundamentally irrational or opinion-based, and someone was ordered to "reverse-engineer" an objection out of that which wasn't trivially refutable - e.g. "the noise from the turbines will keep our submarine sonar from working" or "reports say that human smugglers are hiding aboard the windmills" or whatever.
Yes, I think thats very plausible. "inshore defense operations in an area of strategic importance will be excessively impeded by both development of this site, and future operations in ways which <REDACTED>" type thing.
Not just the fact that Scottish wind farms prevailed, also that he was relentlessly mocked, ridiculed, and protested against in unavoidably visible ways by the Scots.
> Its completely in-line with his personality to hold onto personal grievances for decades to the point that they become policy.
I feel like much of what he does today can be directly attributed to the epic roasting he got from Obama at the correspondents' dinner. Most of us would be absolutely honored by being roasted by the sitting president, but he seemed at the time to take it very personally.
Treating offshore wind like ports and pipelines from a security POV makes sense, it's exactly what we do with offshore O&G. The rub is that securing offshore wind installations is an order of magnitude more resource-intensive than securing a deepwater rig, bc you're talking about a perimeter than spans 100's of square miles, not a single platform with a limited # of risers
If you wanted to defend an O&G field, wouldn't you need to consider a similar extent? per wellhead, yes. but the go to a concentrator for onshore feed don't they? or some kind of attached floating rig, which itself is a SPF.
I thought fields had 100s of square km of extent too. The exclusion zone after nordstream is now pretty big, albiet "temporary" according to the web its 5 to 7 nm so 9 to 13 km so close to 100 km^2
Is that especially simpler than e.g. an attack on the above ground cabling systems by firing carbon fibre conducting wires over them, as the US is said to have done in the Iraq war? Not that I don't think underwater drones are a future risk, but the belief its a risk which can't be mitigated, or a worse risk than ones which exist onshore, seems a bit weak.
But none the less, yes. This would be a risk. Perhaps one which demands better drone detection and defence systems around wind turbines and O&G fields?
Say that it is .. it's still hard to near simultaneously take out all wind generators than to mass swarm (with a smaller number) a single platform, well head grouping, or onshore processing facility.
Recall the context - a field of many wind generators Vs one or two platforms in order to "take down" a state's power grid.
> Treating offshore wind like ports and pipelines from a security POV makes sense
No it does not. Even if you'd manage to disable an entire wind farm, the impact on the grid as a whole is negligible. An attacker has to spend a whole lot of effort on such an attack for very little, if any at all, gain.
In contrast, shell a port or the right piece of infrastructure [1] and entire economies can get wrecked. And shell an oil rig... I mean, I seriously hope even the Russians don't sink that low but hey they did attack a goddamn NPP and a hydropower dam... anyway, taking out an oil rig risks an environmental disaster similar to Deepwater Horizon. That's a lot more effect for an opponent.
The actual threat to wind farms is software. We've seen that in the early days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine - the Russians took down satellite modems [2], causing about 6000 wind turbines to lose their command infrastructure and thus stop generating power.
US wind farms are 30 miles from the coast at most? No country is attacking that under some plausible deniability and it not being seen as an act of war.There are more important power lines further from civilisation running through rural areas in the US. These are not fiber cables a 1000 miles from the coast.
Gas generators can be spun up to provide megawatts in seconds btw. With less than a quarter of the grid being renewable, intermittency is not an issue. Grids are built with resilience in mind (or at least should be...).
I think that wind farms dotted along the entire US coast would be a bad target for crippling US power compared to a few coal/gas/nuclear mega power plants.
Even if there were legitimate concerns surrounding defense of the wind farms, it makes more sense to instead de-risk with redundancy elsewhere, which is increasingly cheap and quick to do thanks to the combo of solar+batteries. That’s what we should be doing anyway if AI data center energy requirements are to continue to increase.
In the 70s the oil companies were furious that Venezuela (if my understanding is correct) revoked their leases and forced them to abandon their equipment investments.
That's basically what the administration was trying to do here, under a legal system which (unlike Venezuela in the 70s) is very keen on protecting corporate investment. It seems like a classic "takings" case.
If the concern is the control module of the wind turbine— that’s not a nationalization and confiscation program. It might look similar in the near-term to participants, but that’s simply because they are functioning as instruments of the control module supplier, extending the inference, which isn’t a legitimate owner of the wind farms or US electrical grid anyway, and is quite unlike the fossil fuel companies in Venezuela of the 1970s.
the Venezuelan oil leases you are talking about was 1990s, not 1970s.
for Venezuelan oil leases to be comparable to wind farms you'd have to have the Venezuelan govt say "we are taking the leases away because we don't want any more offshore oil production", rather than "we are taking these leases away because you are rich and we want to pump the oil ourselves"
the cancelled Venezuelan oil leases were a taking, but that word is less useful in the case of wind farms. I would imagine firms with wind farm contracts would be made whole (i.e. get back lost investment, but not get back potential profit) but it's not a case of the wind farms being given to somebody else or those areas being put to some other use.
if you are "environmental" you might think it's a great loss not to pursue the wind approach, or that it's a great idea to shut down offshore drilling, but that's political not property ownership/taking.
Government lawyers: "Uh, well, we could tell you, but then we'd have to kill you."
Now, I would point out how the US is making itself into a joke, but I'm afraid the joke's on us, because carbon output is not decreasing dramatically like it must, and the effects of global warming will, slowly but surely, become worse with every passing year. I live in a region where warming is predicted to be near twice the global average, so I'm particularly worried about what it's going to be like when I'm old, or in the generation following mine.
Offshore windmills legitimately do interfere with some of these military radars monitoring the coastline that are probably top secret, or so I'm told by people that would know. However, I doubt that's the only reason of course.
If these projects ultimately end up canceled they’ll be the largest “mostly done” infrastructure projects to be cancelled. A huge waste. And a monument to US incompetency.
I dunno. The Americans stuck their hand in a blender for four years and then four years later needed to try it again. Alas, Stumpy McNubs remains long on limbs but short on memory.
"The President's party loses seats in the midterms" is a long-term trend and it seems pretty likely to hold this time.
The real question is, once the Democrats are back in control of at least one house of Congress, are they going to be sane or are they going to spend two years making such fools of themselves that we end up with another Republican President in 2028?
Alas you'll need to define "sane" first. That might be harder than expected.
Equally unfortunate is the need for 60 senate votes to actually have a meaningful say over what the president does. And in truth no part has had "control" of congress to this level for a while.
When one (or indeed both) sides are politically incapable of being bipartisan (witness the outcomes for those voting against party lines, on both sides) control of one house is meaningless and a majority in the senate (short of 60 votes) mostly meaningless.
Expecting any change in behavior after November, regardless of the results, is wishful thinking.
The first time many of Trump's desires to do illegal things were somewhat restrained by non-political government employees who remembered that their oath is to the Constitution, not the President.
Based on what I've read a lot of people who voted for him subsequent times thought that would continue.
He also said his polls are the best they've ever been today. Trump works hard to cultivate an aura of inevitability, but he simply does not have the power to make false things true by declaring them so.
It is not too useful to make bold unsupported claims that the current administration has the power to subvert elections. That just lowers us to their level, and the last thing we need is for a further erosion in confidence in our democratic system. The states run elections, and no matter what Trump says to get people to keep paying attention to him, they don't jump when the president tells them to. The feds have money and nukes, but States have a lot of the actual power.
It’ll come back when there is more policy certainty, China isn’t going anywhere and they’re going to keep building. Luckily, there is manufacturing supply chain safely outside the US. China is roughly a third of global manufacturing capacity after all.
Don’t think in years, think in half decades and decades. This too shall pass.
Yes far worse, the superconducting supercollider produced science which has debatable value. There’s an argument we lost nothing by canceling the project.
Wind farms produce electricity which pays for the investment when you finish but pays nothing when a stop early. This makes stopping early extremely economically harmful.
Esoteric programming language developed for the superconducting super collider, Glish, was picked up by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, which used it well into the 2000s.
Glish supported networked remote procedure calls, made then almost transparent to the program. Otherwise, Glish was roughly similar to Tcl or Lua.
I don't know what other bits and pieces got salvaged from the SSC project.
The sad truth is that it's millions of people. These people just want to see the world burn due to nothing but narcissism and hate of the imaginary "other side".
There are a lot of people on "both sides" who choose their positions on the issues to fit their political party as opposed to choose the party that fits their positions. Particularly for an issue like offshore wind or Keystone XL that is basically "out of sight and out of mind" there are millions of people who would change their position if the right people told them to.
That's how parties work, of necessity. They are all uneasy alliances of people who can barely tolerate each other. People find the one that supports their most important issues and hopefully few things they really detest. Then they have to pay at least lip service to all of it. By getting everyone else's support, at least one or two of your favorite issues get worked on.
In doing so you need to find a way to live with the cognitive dissonance. The best way is to truly buy into all of it, as hard as you can. That wins and keeps on winning. Or you can try to mitigate things to your conscience, but that leads to a lot of halfhearted efforts and poor turnout.
There are democracies with proportional representation out there. Those have their own problems in forming coalitions, but the parties themselves are much closer aligned with their base.
99% of every person's beliefs are driven by what "the right people told them," of course.
That's not really the point nor the problem, because some people choose to listen to very stupid or malicious people and others are (by chance or by skill) more susceptible to being steered by more credible people.
Half the country is in thrall with a uniquely malicious and moronic force, and the other half is vaguely in alignment with the vague directional gestures of expert consensus (even though it's sometimes wrong!). These are not at all the same, even if they both are technically "believing what people told them to."
There it is, the both sides brigade, right on time!
No, Keystone XL was not the same level of pettiness as offshore wind. Find me the IPCC report equivalent that makes the case for wind farms doing whatever social damage Trump says they do. I'll wait.
There are not in fact millions of people who want to burn the world just to spite others. If you truly believe that then you have really failed to understand people around you, and should try to better empathize. As a rule, people do what they do because they believe it to be the right thing. They might be misguided in that belief, of course, but the idea of millions of people deciding on a cartoonishly evil course of action is not an accurate analysis of anything.
The Keystone XL pipeline had been partially constructed before President Biden revoked the permit on January 20, 2021 on his first day in office.
About 300 miles had been completed when TC Energy officially abandoned the project.
I am all for green energy, but these windfarms were designed years ago. Since then, solar has progressed in leaps whereas wind has not. Im not so sure that fighting the olds over wind farms is the fight worth winning. Let them cancel the wind farms if that means a free hand to develop solar.
solar only runs during the day and when it is not cloudy, wind farms can run constantly with low weather impact
multiple energy sources are what is important to make up for where solar falls short. sure solar is amazing, but it will never replace everything on its own
The market realities don't pan out. Texas has a huge and diversified renewable energy sector. Wind was supplying nearly 45% of energy capacity last night, with solar providing close to 57% during its peak yesterday. Power storage discharge peaked around 13% and it's typically only used to round out capacity in the early morning and evening when peak demand coincides with low solar generation...
And that's in Texas where there is tons of sun and wind. I would imagine markets where wind, and in particular off shore wind, could make a lot more sense compared to attempting 100% solar generation. If I had to wager, maybe where they are building offshore wind generation..
That’s only because of the thermal storage. The output of the solar collectors is massively impacted by clouds, also just by haze and aerosols, much more than PV, which is happy with diffuse and direct sunlight.
Then there’s the cost, which has not been good for CSP’s market share.
What olds? The shutdown here was ostensibly for national security reasons.
> Let them cancel the wind farms if that means a free hand to develop solar.
That's not actually a bargain anyone has the power to agree to in a binding way. The people protesting the appearance of wind farms are on the coasts, the people protesting solar are in the country's interior. There's no "deal" you can make to get the latter instead of the former. Just build all the power generation and then we'll have cheaper electricity and a more resilient grid.
It doesn't mean a free hand to develop solar. The Trump administration hates solar, too, and is doing as much as it can to hinder solar development.
Also, wind and solar have different production patterns, such as how they perform seasonally, how weather affects them, and how they perform at different times of day. You are much better off including a good mix of them in your system.
Solar and wind are good complements. Solar works during the day and best on clear, windless days. Wind blows best during the night and on cloudy, stormy days. Solar is best in summer and wind in winter.
Wind also works better in some areas that don't have solar. UK has a lot of offshore wind, but less solar. The US Northeast has a lot of wind but lags behind on solar.
Wind has dropped significantly in price over the decades and is competitive in price with solar. I saw article about early Scottish wind farm being upgraded so that one new turbine equals the whole old farm.
I theory yes, but grid storage favors solar. Solar can be placed much closer to consumption, literally on the roof of the consumer. Wind exists in large farms away from cities. They are not perfect partners.
The rich/old paticularly hate wind because they do not like looking at it. (The link to golf courses is not by accident. Wind farms and golf course tend to appear together due to them both gravitating towards areas with shallow waters.) We still here stories about blinking shadows interupting sleep cycles, even causing cancer. So perhaps we let them alone for another decade and allow solar+storage to take up the slack. Then, when the nimby people are no longer in power, we bring back wind.
(Shallow sea means no commercial traffic/ports. That means cheap land for non-industrial things like yacht clubs and big houses, which give rise to golf courses. So the rich/old dont like seeing the wind farms that, inevitably, want to live just offshore of their yacht/golf clubs. See Nantuket.)
None of the points you were responding to are “in theory”.
You are proposing something that sounds like killing the US wind industry and then simply bringing it back later. That probably would work well, especially when projects have development lead times of several to many years.
With solar you get to overbuild it and charge you batteries once a day. Wind has way more peaks and bottoms, so you can sell your battery capacity several times most days.
But the GPs point is exactly that you need fewer batteries if you have both. Fewer batteries tends to be cheaper than more, and this pair is a very common case.
> Solar can be placed much closer to consumption, literally on the roof of the consumer. Wind exists in large farms away from cities.
You still need the grid to exist, so 100 miles one way or the other doesn't affect cost very much.
> Then, when the nimby people are no longer in power, we bring back wind.
NIMBY never goes away. There are some situations where you don't want to burn up your political capital fighting them, but in general if you can get a project through then do it.
You don't appear to be "all for green energy" if you want to prohibit some forms of green energy. In fact that appears to be the stance of someone who opposes green energy
That definitely won't be what they're using that free hand for, unfortunately. I wish it weren't true, but the Republican party is sticking to its blanket opposition to anything that isn't fossil-fuel related. Add it to the growing list of stuff to be annoyed / angry about.
There'll be a ton of people running, any of which I think would be highly competitive against Vance: Walz, Pritzker, Newsom, Chris Murphy, Harris, Josh Shapiro, etc.
But I think Mark Kelly is likely to be a top-tier candidate from the jump. He's not my favorite of the bunch, necessarily, but I'd consider putting money on him being the Democratic nominee in 2028.
The midterms this year can already seriously throw wrenches into the Project 2025 plans. Trump's failure to address the economy situation, the constant and ongoing wars, ICE seriously disrupting agriculture and construction sites, ICE executing white people in front of cameras [1] and now the latest Epstein crap... Democrats are flipping what used to be solid-red seats these days.
People are fed up. Assuming there will be free elections - as absurd as it is to even write this sentence referring to the US, but here we are [2] - it most probably will end in an utter wipeout for MAGA. They'll have the President, of course, but assuming the Democrat leadership finds some spine - again, an assumption, given Schumer - stuff has the potential to change.
On top of that are state and local level elections that are all the time. Stuff like school boards, sheriffs, whatever that is where MAGA and the Evangelicals built out their initial networks. All of that can be flipped around as well, if people actually bother to show up and vote.
Weird to see this so downvoted on the same day that Trump asked republicans to "Nationalize" elections in 15 places. Whatever that means.
> “Republicans should say, ‘We want to take control of this. We need to take control of voting in at least 15 places.’ Republicans should nationalize voting,” [Trump] said on the podcast of former FBI deputy director Dan Bongino, which was relaunched on Monday.
I would guess that many politicians (of both sides, see also MTG) suddenly start to rethink how bad they want the public job when Trump turns the firehose of death threats their direction.
3 years of Trump getting progressively weaker as more and more Republicans in purple districts decide they are more likely to be reelected by going against Trump than by supporting him. Not to mention the midterms will at least make it impossible to get any legislation passed that they want (which, thankfully, they have been mercifully incompetent at so far).
The reality, of course, being that wind farm construction is big on labour, specialist transport machinery, crane operating, jacking, bolts, working to weather extreme thresholds, etc.
Different as from a distance but still a lot of applicable skill and team work experience transfer for many workers.
I mean, we need all the electricity we can get to run all of these datacenters, right? So I think this might be one of those things that the Republicans quietly allow to continue so that the corporate interests can maximize electricity production
> ...the Department of the Interior settled on a single justification for blocking turbine installation: a classified national security risk.
To speculate on what this risk is, the two obvious risk I can think of would be:
- Susceptibility to seabed warfare[0]. A rival nation can sabotage the infrastructure and maintain deniability, like we have seen with the Nord Stream sabotage[1].
- Potential interference with passive sonar systems, the turbines are likely to generate a fair bit of noise, which could potentially make it harder for SOSUS[2] to detect rival submarines.
If a country changes course every four years, how can the success of a long-term project be ensured?
And what of its negotiating credibility? How can the other side trust that an agreement will hold in the future?
This is not a critique, but a genuine curiosity, because there's an obvious drawback with a system with opposing world views.
Unless, of course, something still unites them in the first place, with acceptable disparity on each side turning it into an advantage of flexibility and adaptability while keeping the focus on long-term ideas and plans.
China doesn't have flip-flopping like this with its attendant massive waste. Instead it has endemic corruption which siphons off funds all over the place, perhaps with the exception of the big projects that command the full attention of central leadership.
Yet somehow they've managed to eliminate extreme poverty and challenge the U.S. in GDP. Sounds like cope to me. They couldn't do that with extreme corruption like we tolerate in U.S. allies.
They "eliminated" extreme poverty caused by communist control in the first place, by going to a capitalist system.
There were tons of economic low-hanging fruits by building out large infrastructure projects, which corruption happily siphoned off of.
The ROI of these infra projects have been gone for a while, yet they continued. Also it's been stealing intellectual property, trade dumping, exporting deflation. Soaking up the manufacturing oxygen of everyone else through subsidies, elite capture, then using the leverage gained and veiled threats against others to force them to yield resources, market access and political control.
> perhaps with the exception of the big projects that command the full attention of central leadership.
This is notably an area where the US is massively crippled. States can manage many year projects easier, but the federal government must conceal all such projects behind defense spending. Even that is wildly mismanaged (see: all the canceled naval purchases over the last two decades, and we still have an outdated, if large, navy)
Also, China can lobby indirectly through media manipulation, and relatively cheaply disrupt our already clunky-feeling Democratic governmental processes.
I'm not sure I follow the questions. The success of a long-term project can be ensured through the procedures described in the source article: you set up a durable judicial system, and invest them with the power to require that the country uphold its end of the bargain, no matter how much its current political leaders might want to change course.
you set up a durable judicial system, and give them their own army.
That's the only way to work around Trump. According to the Constitution, no one can actually make the executive branch do anything it doesn't want to do.
No, that's not accurate. The courts frequently make Trump and his cronies do things they don't want to do, and prevent them from doing things they do want to do. Multiple such cases are described in the source article.
If Trump defies 1 in 3 of the court orders against him, that still means judges successfully stopped him 2 times out of 3. I'm not interested in a discussion where we equivocate between what's true today and worst case scenarios that could become true in the future, sorry.
you should have learned by now what trump et al are doing… these “cases” they are “losing” are just smoke&mirrors for the general public to go “see, they obey the law” on things they do not particularly give a hoot about. the ones they do care about no one is “stopping” - the way you can tell which one is which is when they completely ignore the constitution and any existing law(s) or when they hit up the judicial extension of their party - the scotus - to rubberstamp something. even there, once in a while, they’ll make a call to (often temporarily) “lose”
It seems to me that we're seeing precisely the opposite. Trump enjoys the appearance of inevitability, so whenever he finds something he cannot force through, he pretends that it doesn't matter to him and he never really cared about it in the first place.
I'd encourage you to make a list of the top 10 things you're worried he's about to do now, and check back in a few months to see how many of them came true. One big transition point in my thinking was in July of last year, when I remembered how much he'd bragged in March that the Department of Education would soon be shut down. He does a large number of terrible things, yes, but he also can't do most of the terrible things he says he's going to do.
> That does not end the Court’s concerns, however. Attached to this order is an
appendix that identifies 96 court orders that ICE has violated in 74 cases. The extent of ICE’s noncompliance is almost certainly substantially understated. This list is confined to orders issued since January 1, 2026, and the list was hurriedly compiled by extraordinarily busy judges. Undoubtedly, mistakes were made, and orders that should have appeared on this list were omitted.
This list should give pause to anyone—no matter his or her political beliefs—who cares about the rule of law. ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.
This is absolutely nuts to read, and yet isn't the first time we've read such kind of language in court opinions and publications with this administration.
> how can the success of a long-term project be ensured?
Well, for one by ensuring that 'long-term' means it starts at the start of a term and ends before the end of that term. At most that only rules out nuclear, at least wrt long term energy projects. And it's not like recent dem administrations were unfriendly towards nuclear. Vogtle 3/4 were approved early in Obama's term, and finished under Biden's.
"Long term" means decades when it comes to energy strategy, major infrastructure initiatives, and decarbonization. Four years is woefully inadequate for strategic planning, you’re operating on a tactical level at best.
No, this is the core of a particular brand of politics: neoliberal politics. Where the financialization of everything is what's most important. There was a time, still in lived memory, where the US government was able to complete many types of projects and it also coincided with the period of lowest economic inequality (the great compression), the expansion of civil rights, and had the highest taxes against the elites this country has ever seen.
Obviously if you hate democracy you'll want to destroy this system, which is what they've been working at for the last 50ish years.
Tax rates are not the same as effective taxes paid, and US taxes as a percent of GDP are at an all time high. This is besides the fact that gdp is many times higher, growing geometrically.
It is an interesting question of what changed in terms of ability to execute, but lack of funding isn't the answer. I suspect it is a combination of scope creep, application to intractable problems, and baumols cost disease at work.
Which is largely why presidencies do not mess with the order they inherit too much (subjective statement I know). Most institutions and projects are not stressed and the government branches just keep doing what they always did. The current administration is an outlier, but we all know that.
It doesn't matter I'd they hold back or not. The perception of political instability is enough.
If, as an investor, I'm asked to throw billions at a multi-year project, political risk is going to be on the PowerPoint.
You may think this current administration is an aberration, but it serves to prove that aberrations can happen. That the levers supposed to prevent this (congress, courts) are creaking. Sure a judge ruled for now, but this is a long way from finished.)
And that's enough to create doubt. Lots of doubt. The impact of this on long-term future infrastructure projects cannot be over-stated.
(Let's leave aside that this project was 6 years in the planning, during his first term, before construction start in 2022... which just makes the current behavior worse, not better.)
1. Freedom — free markets, minimal regulation
Early USA had both political and economic freedom. Modern China has only economic freedom (plus heavy protectionism).
2. Dictatorship of a certain group
Modern USA and the Western world have a dictatorship of lawyers, regulators, and ideological enforcement. Communist China has straightforward political dictatorship.
As you can see, it's not black and white. China struggled when they had both economic and political dictatorship, but thrived once they introduced economic freedom.
3. It's always a race, freedom of the past is not enough.
What the West should do is focus on better planning, less politics, more economic freedom, and a dictatorship of data-driven decisions instead.
ggm | 7 hours ago
Steelmanning the risks, its the link to mainland as a weakness in supply chain of power, compared to onshore sources possibly. But, the construction is in close water, well inside the exclusive economic zone. You would think passage of a craft capable of causing a power shock with an anchor chain was raising hackles well before this, because it's hugely unusual for a warcraft of another nation to be that close without an explicit permit. Under the Jones act, all inshore commercial craft delivering goods to and from named ports have to be US badged, for international shipping it's clear from the baltic there's a concrete risk, but that's a matter of policing the boats, not banning the structures at risk.
A second steelman might be some belief about the intermittency. Thats easily knocked over because the system as a whole is building out storage and continuity systems, is adapting to a mix of technology with different power availability throughout the day, and of all the sources of power, wind is one of the most easily predicted to a useful window forward. You know roughly when a dunkelflaut is expected inside 48h, if you don't know exactly when, or for how long. Thats well north of the spin-up time for alternative (dirty) sources of power, if your storage capacity isn't there yet to handle it.
kentm | 7 hours ago
Its completely in-line with his personality to hold onto personal grievances for decades to the point that they become policy.
ggm | 7 hours ago
maxerickson | 6 hours ago
duskwuff | 6 hours ago
ggm | 6 hours ago
defrost | 7 hours ago
Not just the fact that Scottish wind farms prevailed, also that he was relentlessly mocked, ridiculed, and protested against in unavoidably visible ways by the Scots.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NNWmZwObZc
( Note: while a recent youtube clip, the anti Trump protests in Scotland date back to well before his campaign for his first term as POTUS )
rootusrootus | 3 hours ago
I feel like much of what he does today can be directly attributed to the epic roasting he got from Obama at the correspondents' dinner. Most of us would be absolutely honored by being roasted by the sitting president, but he seemed at the time to take it very personally.
CGMthrowaway | 7 hours ago
ggm | 7 hours ago
I thought fields had 100s of square km of extent too. The exclusion zone after nordstream is now pretty big, albiet "temporary" according to the web its 5 to 7 nm so 9 to 13 km so close to 100 km^2
CGMthrowaway | 5 hours ago
rootusrootus | 3 hours ago
defrost | 7 hours ago
ie. They can nibble a bit at an array before you're onto them Vs everything gets thrown at a point source target.
anonymousDan | 6 hours ago
ggm | 6 hours ago
But none the less, yes. This would be a risk. Perhaps one which demands better drone detection and defence systems around wind turbines and O&G fields?
wombatpm | 5 hours ago
defrost | 6 hours ago
Recall the context - a field of many wind generators Vs one or two platforms in order to "take down" a state's power grid.
Ropes are strong because of many strands.
ssl-3 | 6 hours ago
mschuster91 | 4 hours ago
No it does not. Even if you'd manage to disable an entire wind farm, the impact on the grid as a whole is negligible. An attacker has to spend a whole lot of effort on such an attack for very little, if any at all, gain.
In contrast, shell a port or the right piece of infrastructure [1] and entire economies can get wrecked. And shell an oil rig... I mean, I seriously hope even the Russians don't sink that low but hey they did attack a goddamn NPP and a hydropower dam... anyway, taking out an oil rig risks an environmental disaster similar to Deepwater Horizon. That's a lot more effect for an opponent.
The actual threat to wind farms is software. We've seen that in the early days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine - the Russians took down satellite modems [2], causing about 6000 wind turbines to lose their command infrastructure and thus stop generating power.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Scott_Key_Bridge_colla...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viasat_hack
janice1999 | 7 hours ago
Gas generators can be spun up to provide megawatts in seconds btw. With less than a quarter of the grid being renewable, intermittency is not an issue. Grids are built with resilience in mind (or at least should be...).
lovich | 5 hours ago
wattso | 5 hours ago
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/business/energy/trump-offshore-wind-...
ggm | 5 hours ago
aqme28 | 5 hours ago
cosmic_cheese | 3 hours ago
pjdesno | 7 hours ago
That's basically what the administration was trying to do here, under a legal system which (unlike Venezuela in the 70s) is very keen on protecting corporate investment. It seems like a classic "takings" case.
unyttigfjelltol | 6 hours ago
fsckboy | 6 hours ago
for Venezuelan oil leases to be comparable to wind farms you'd have to have the Venezuelan govt say "we are taking the leases away because we don't want any more offshore oil production", rather than "we are taking these leases away because you are rich and we want to pump the oil ourselves"
the cancelled Venezuelan oil leases were a taking, but that word is less useful in the case of wind farms. I would imagine firms with wind farm contracts would be made whole (i.e. get back lost investment, but not get back potential profit) but it's not a case of the wind farms being given to somebody else or those areas being put to some other use.
if you are "environmental" you might think it's a great loss not to pursue the wind approach, or that it's a great idea to shut down offshore drilling, but that's political not property ownership/taking.
bruce511 | 17 minutes ago
Wait..what? Made whole by whom? Has this happened before?
(I'm genuinely curious, I've not seen this brought up before...)
einpoklum | 6 hours ago
Government lawyers: "Uh, well, we could tell you, but then we'd have to kill you."
Now, I would point out how the US is making itself into a joke, but I'm afraid the joke's on us, because carbon output is not decreasing dramatically like it must, and the effects of global warming will, slowly but surely, become worse with every passing year. I live in a region where warming is predicted to be near twice the global average, so I'm particularly worried about what it's going to be like when I'm old, or in the generation following mine.
IhateAI | 3 hours ago
softwaredoug | 6 hours ago
toomuchtodo | 6 hours ago
Waterluvian | 6 hours ago
actionfromafar | 6 hours ago
Waterluvian | 6 hours ago
toomuchtodo | 5 hours ago
https://old.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1puwkpj/democrats...
https://old.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1qu6vyu/trump_cal...
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5716988-democrats-scor...
https://www.npr.org/2026/02/01/nx-s1-5695678/democrat-taylor...
AnthonyMouse | 2 hours ago
The real question is, once the Democrats are back in control of at least one house of Congress, are they going to be sane or are they going to spend two years making such fools of themselves that we end up with another Republican President in 2028?
bruce511 | 21 minutes ago
Equally unfortunate is the need for 60 senate votes to actually have a meaningful say over what the president does. And in truth no part has had "control" of congress to this level for a while.
When one (or indeed both) sides are politically incapable of being bipartisan (witness the outcomes for those voting against party lines, on both sides) control of one house is meaningless and a majority in the senate (short of 60 votes) mostly meaningless.
Expecting any change in behavior after November, regardless of the results, is wishful thinking.
tzs | 4 hours ago
Based on what I've read a lot of people who voted for him subsequent times thought that would continue.
behringer | 5 hours ago
amanaplanacanal | 4 hours ago
prawn | 3 hours ago
rootusrootus | 3 hours ago
XorNot | 38 minutes ago
Dylan16807 | 3 hours ago
estearum | 2 hours ago
SpicyLemonZest | 2 hours ago
rootusrootus | 3 hours ago
vkou | 26 minutes ago
softwaredoug | 5 hours ago
toomuchtodo | 5 hours ago
> Several of these projects are near completion and are likely to be done before any government appeal can be heard.
Just gotta keep grinding towards success.
int0x29 | 4 hours ago
toomuchtodo | 3 hours ago
Don’t think in years, think in half decades and decades. This too shall pass.
https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-exports-data-e...
bgroins | 6 hours ago
xeonmc | 5 hours ago
Retric | 5 hours ago
Wind farms produce electricity which pays for the investment when you finish but pays nothing when a stop early. This makes stopping early extremely economically harmful.
watersb | 5 hours ago
Glish supported networked remote procedure calls, made then almost transparent to the program. Otherwise, Glish was roughly similar to Tcl or Lua.
I don't know what other bits and pieces got salvaged from the SSC project.
shawn_w | an hour ago
willis936 | 4 hours ago
_aavaa_ | 4 hours ago
JumpCrisscross | 5 hours ago
But a windfall for the litigation financier that buys those claims off the U.S. government.
These leases are contracts. Sovereign immunity is curtailed when the U.S. contracts.
kabdib | 4 hours ago
"corruption"
verdverm | 3 hours ago
bmitc | 3 hours ago
PaulHoule | 3 hours ago
jfengel | 2 hours ago
In doing so you need to find a way to live with the cognitive dissonance. The best way is to truly buy into all of it, as hard as you can. That wins and keeps on winning. Or you can try to mitigate things to your conscience, but that leads to a lot of halfhearted efforts and poor turnout.
CrossVR | 2 hours ago
Fixed that for you.
There are democracies with proportional representation out there. Those have their own problems in forming coalitions, but the parties themselves are much closer aligned with their base.
estearum | 2 hours ago
That's not really the point nor the problem, because some people choose to listen to very stupid or malicious people and others are (by chance or by skill) more susceptible to being steered by more credible people.
Half the country is in thrall with a uniquely malicious and moronic force, and the other half is vaguely in alignment with the vague directional gestures of expert consensus (even though it's sometimes wrong!). These are not at all the same, even if they both are technically "believing what people told them to."
smallmancontrov | an hour ago
No, Keystone XL was not the same level of pettiness as offshore wind. Find me the IPCC report equivalent that makes the case for wind farms doing whatever social damage Trump says they do. I'll wait.
bigstrat2003 | an hour ago
donkeybeer | 58 minutes ago
SlavikCA | 36 minutes ago
The Keystone XL pipeline had been partially constructed before President Biden revoked the permit on January 20, 2021 on his first day in office. About 300 miles had been completed when TC Energy officially abandoned the project.
dyauspitr | 4 hours ago
zobzu | 2 hours ago
sephamorr | 2 hours ago
sandworm101 | 6 hours ago
Rapzid | 6 hours ago
monero-xmr | 6 hours ago
bronson | 5 hours ago
monero-xmr | 4 hours ago
deathanatos | 4 hours ago
triceratops | 2 hours ago
See? Anyone can make kill-shot arguments when there's no data.
aspbee555 | 6 hours ago
multiple energy sources are what is important to make up for where solar falls short. sure solar is amazing, but it will never replace everything on its own
anon7000 | 6 hours ago
Solar + battery is just so good at staying stable and productive for decades with no moving parts, minimal maintenance, and unbeatable scalability
Rapzid | 6 hours ago
https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards
And that's in Texas where there is tons of sun and wind. I would imagine markets where wind, and in particular off shore wind, could make a lot more sense compared to attempting 100% solar generation. If I had to wager, maybe where they are building offshore wind generation..
Jedd | 4 hours ago
Solar PVC output directly and immediately correlates to sun landing on the panels.
Solar thermal runs well into the evening, and its output is not impacted by the occasional cloud.
sunshinesnacks | 3 hours ago
Then there’s the cost, which has not been good for CSP’s market share.
Analemma_ | 6 hours ago
> Let them cancel the wind farms if that means a free hand to develop solar.
That's not actually a bargain anyone has the power to agree to in a binding way. The people protesting the appearance of wind farms are on the coasts, the people protesting solar are in the country's interior. There's no "deal" you can make to get the latter instead of the former. Just build all the power generation and then we'll have cheaper electricity and a more resilient grid.
tzs | 6 hours ago
Also, wind and solar have different production patterns, such as how they perform seasonally, how weather affects them, and how they perform at different times of day. You are much better off including a good mix of them in your system.
ianburrell | 6 hours ago
Wind also works better in some areas that don't have solar. UK has a lot of offshore wind, but less solar. The US Northeast has a lot of wind but lags behind on solar.
Wind has dropped significantly in price over the decades and is competitive in price with solar. I saw article about early Scottish wind farm being upgraded so that one new turbine equals the whole old farm.
sandworm101 | 5 hours ago
The rich/old paticularly hate wind because they do not like looking at it. (The link to golf courses is not by accident. Wind farms and golf course tend to appear together due to them both gravitating towards areas with shallow waters.) We still here stories about blinking shadows interupting sleep cycles, even causing cancer. So perhaps we let them alone for another decade and allow solar+storage to take up the slack. Then, when the nimby people are no longer in power, we bring back wind.
(Shallow sea means no commercial traffic/ports. That means cheap land for non-industrial things like yacht clubs and big houses, which give rise to golf courses. So the rich/old dont like seeing the wind farms that, inevitably, want to live just offshore of their yacht/golf clubs. See Nantuket.)
sunshinesnacks | 3 hours ago
You are proposing something that sounds like killing the US wind industry and then simply bringing it back later. That probably would work well, especially when projects have development lead times of several to many years.
marcosdumay | 3 hours ago
With solar you get to overbuild it and charge you batteries once a day. Wind has way more peaks and bottoms, so you can sell your battery capacity several times most days.
But the GPs point is exactly that you need fewer batteries if you have both. Fewer batteries tends to be cheaper than more, and this pair is a very common case.
Dylan16807 | 3 hours ago
In what way?
> Solar can be placed much closer to consumption, literally on the roof of the consumer. Wind exists in large farms away from cities.
You still need the grid to exist, so 100 miles one way or the other doesn't affect cost very much.
> Then, when the nimby people are no longer in power, we bring back wind.
NIMBY never goes away. There are some situations where you don't want to burn up your political capital fighting them, but in general if you can get a project through then do it.
malfist | 6 hours ago
leosussan | 5 hours ago
petcat | 6 hours ago
toomuchtodo | 6 hours ago
aaronbrethorst | 6 hours ago
But I think Mark Kelly is likely to be a top-tier candidate from the jump. He's not my favorite of the bunch, necessarily, but I'd consider putting money on him being the Democratic nominee in 2028.
zthrowaway | 6 hours ago
mschuster91 | 4 hours ago
People are fed up. Assuming there will be free elections - as absurd as it is to even write this sentence referring to the US, but here we are [2] - it most probably will end in an utter wipeout for MAGA. They'll have the President, of course, but assuming the Democrat leadership finds some spine - again, an assumption, given Schumer - stuff has the potential to change.
On top of that are state and local level elections that are all the time. Stuff like school boards, sheriffs, whatever that is where MAGA and the Evangelicals built out their initial networks. All of that can be flipped around as well, if people actually bother to show up and vote.
[1] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_shootings_by_U.S._immi... - it is notable that widespread outrage only followed after the execution of Renee Good and Alex Pretti
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/02/georgia-fult...
actionfromafar | 6 hours ago
carefulfungi | 4 hours ago
> “Republicans should say, ‘We want to take control of this. We need to take control of voting in at least 15 places.’ Republicans should nationalize voting,” [Trump] said on the podcast of former FBI deputy director Dan Bongino, which was relaunched on Monday.
rootusrootus | 3 hours ago
It means Trump is sucking the oxygen out of the room. Again. I wish we would quit reacting to every stupid thing he says.
b00ty4breakfast | 30 minutes ago
shagie | 5 hours ago
https://www.uppermichiganssource.com/2026/01/29/tim-walz-say...
> MINNEAPOLIS (Gray News) - Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said he will not run for elected office again.
> Walz touched on his political plans in a recent interview with cable news channel MS Now.
> “I will never run for an elected office again,” Walz said. “Never again.”
> The 2024 Democratic vice-presidential nominee said he plans to “do the work” while finding other ways to serve the country.
rootusrootus | 3 hours ago
estearum | 2 hours ago
rootusrootus | 3 hours ago
bpodgursky | 2 hours ago
dyauspitr | 2 hours ago
aussieguy1234 | 4 hours ago
The only way they can keep their jobs working on vastly inferior, dangerous technology is to ban new, safer, better technology.
defrost | 4 hours ago
Different as from a distance but still a lot of applicable skill and team work experience transfer for many workers.
firejake308 | 3 hours ago
WatchDog | 3 hours ago
To speculate on what this risk is, the two obvious risk I can think of would be:
- Susceptibility to seabed warfare[0]. A rival nation can sabotage the infrastructure and maintain deniability, like we have seen with the Nord Stream sabotage[1].
- Potential interference with passive sonar systems, the turbines are likely to generate a fair bit of noise, which could potentially make it harder for SOSUS[2] to detect rival submarines.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seabed_warfare
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Stream_pipelines_sabotage
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOSUS
eclipticplane | 2 hours ago
The former is a threat vector but one that can be priced into the ongoing maintenance costs.
igorramazanov | 2 hours ago
And what of its negotiating credibility? How can the other side trust that an agreement will hold in the future?
This is not a critique, but a genuine curiosity, because there's an obvious drawback with a system with opposing world views.
Unless, of course, something still unites them in the first place, with acceptable disparity on each side turning it into an advantage of flexibility and adaptability while keeping the focus on long-term ideas and plans.
pwarner | 2 hours ago
SecretDreams | 2 hours ago
chongli | 2 hours ago
tehjoker | 51 minutes ago
monting | 24 minutes ago
There were tons of economic low-hanging fruits by building out large infrastructure projects, which corruption happily siphoned off of.
The ROI of these infra projects have been gone for a while, yet they continued. Also it's been stealing intellectual property, trade dumping, exporting deflation. Soaking up the manufacturing oxygen of everyone else through subsidies, elite capture, then using the leverage gained and veiled threats against others to force them to yield resources, market access and political control.
s1artibartfast | 22 minutes ago
FranklinJabar | 35 minutes ago
This is notably an area where the US is massively crippled. States can manage many year projects easier, but the federal government must conceal all such projects behind defense spending. Even that is wildly mismanaged (see: all the canceled naval purchases over the last two decades, and we still have an outdated, if large, navy)
ncr100 | an hour ago
SpicyLemonZest | 2 hours ago
CamperBob2 | 2 hours ago
That's the only way to work around Trump. According to the Constitution, no one can actually make the executive branch do anything it doesn't want to do.
SpicyLemonZest | 2 hours ago
CamperBob2 | an hour ago
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalist_Society
That aside: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/07/21/trump-cou...
Edit due to rate-limiting: that makes two of us.
SpicyLemonZest | an hour ago
bdangubic | an hour ago
SpicyLemonZest | 33 minutes ago
I'd encourage you to make a list of the top 10 things you're worried he's about to do now, and check back in a few months to see how many of them came true. One big transition point in my thinking was in July of last year, when I remembered how much he'd bragged in March that the Department of Education would soon be shut down. He does a large number of terrible things, yes, but he also can't do most of the terrible things he says he's going to do.
vel0city | 53 minutes ago
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mnd.230...
This is absolutely nuts to read, and yet isn't the first time we've read such kind of language in court opinions and publications with this administration.
alextheparrot | 2 hours ago
Octoth0rpe | 2 hours ago
Well, for one by ensuring that 'long-term' means it starts at the start of a term and ends before the end of that term. At most that only rules out nuclear, at least wrt long term energy projects. And it's not like recent dem administrations were unfriendly towards nuclear. Vogtle 3/4 were approved early in Obama's term, and finished under Biden's.
Sharlin | an hour ago
sirspacey | an hour ago
the shape of how things actually work is what’s left when constant churn (and now budget blocking) is a fact of life
shimman | an hour ago
Obviously if you hate democracy you'll want to destroy this system, which is what they've been working at for the last 50ish years.
s1artibartfast | 58 minutes ago
It is an interesting question of what changed in terms of ability to execute, but lack of funding isn't the answer. I suspect it is a combination of scope creep, application to intractable problems, and baumols cost disease at work.
vvpan | an hour ago
Krasnol | 42 minutes ago
Seeing what's possible in this position, I doubt future US presidents will hold back.
gimmeThaBeet | 36 minutes ago
bruce511 | 30 minutes ago
If, as an investor, I'm asked to throw billions at a multi-year project, political risk is going to be on the PowerPoint.
You may think this current administration is an aberration, but it serves to prove that aberrations can happen. That the levers supposed to prevent this (congress, courts) are creaking. Sure a judge ruled for now, but this is a long way from finished.)
And that's enough to create doubt. Lots of doubt. The impact of this on long-term future infrastructure projects cannot be over-stated.
(Let's leave aside that this project was 6 years in the planning, during his first term, before construction start in 2022... which just makes the current behavior worse, not better.)
maxdo | 2 hours ago
1. Freedom — free markets, minimal regulation Early USA had both political and economic freedom. Modern China has only economic freedom (plus heavy protectionism).
2. Dictatorship of a certain group Modern USA and the Western world have a dictatorship of lawyers, regulators, and ideological enforcement. Communist China has straightforward political dictatorship. As you can see, it's not black and white. China struggled when they had both economic and political dictatorship, but thrived once they introduced economic freedom.
3. It's always a race, freedom of the past is not enough. What the West should do is focus on better planning, less politics, more economic freedom, and a dictatorship of data-driven decisions instead.