Maine’s floating wind program takes another hit – Watts Up With That?

From CFACT

By David Wojick

The US Energy Department recently suspended a large grant at the University of Maine for research on floating wind technology. The full significance of this suspension will not be known until it plays out, but it is useful to see the context. This research plays a central role in Maine’s massive offshore wind development program, which CFACT has been fighting for some time with sizable success.

Maine averages just a mere 1,500 MW of electricity consumption, but they want to have a crazy 3,000 MW of offshore wind. This target assumes complete electrification of cars, trucks, home heat, etc. – the full transition, which is never going to happen.

Even worse, given the great offshore depths, this has to be floating wind which costs around three times as much as fixed bottom wind, which is already way too expensive. Floating wind is also environmentally destructive with a vast undersea web of anchoring cables.

It also requires a big factory to make the huge floaters that carry the turbine towers. Maine’s objectionable choice of a factory site is Sears Island, the largest uninhabited and undeveloped island on the East Coast. Maine legislator Reagan Paul’s district includes Sears Island and she is adamantly against this project. CFACT has worked closely with her in this fight.

Central to the Maine plan is the use of floating wind technology being developed by the University of Maine. You can see some of their research work funded under the now stopped grant here: “Optimized Floating Offshore Wind Turbine Substructure Design Trends for 10–30 MW Turbines in Low-, Medium-, and High-Severity Wave Environments”.

https://www.mdpi.com/2411-9660/8/4/72

Thus, the DOE funded research that was just stopped is on the critical path for the Maine plan. In fact, the University researchers were in the process of building, launching, and operating a small scale version of their floater design. The floater is sitting at a dock waiting for its turbine tower to be erected.

However, Maine’s entire offshore program has already been stopped, at least for now, which might make the research moot. This stoppage is an event that CFACT likely played a key role in.

The Sears Island floater factory was going to cost a lot of money, so Maine applied to the US Transportation Department for a roughly half billion dollar grant to pay for most of it. DOT had already given a similar huge grant to California.

CFACT research found that this DOT grant program was intended for projects that improved US freight traffic, which a floater factory certainly does not do. Thus the grant would be a misallocation of federal funds.

So we filed a complaint with GAO’s Fraud, Waste, and Abuse Reporting System. They examined it and sent it to the DOT Inspector General. Not long after that, DOT notified Maine that their grant application would not be funded.

It is possible that DOT turned Maine down for other reasons, but the timing makes it likely that we blew the telling whistle. Of course DOT did not say the grant would be inappropriate as they had already made one just like it. But President Trump was about to take office, so maybe they decided it was time to abandon Biden’s illegal grant practice once it was pointed out.

For more on the foolishness of the Maine program see my report here: http://www.cfact.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Maines-massive-floating-wind-folly.pdf

Getting back to the DOE research grant stoppage, it would be great if they were joining EPA and Interior in carrying out the President’s policy of stopping offshore wind. EPA and Interior have each recently stopped a major offshore wind project.

However, as with the DOE research stoppage, all of these actions are temporary, at least on paper. Each says there is an investigation going on, as does the President’s offshore wind executive order.

So there is a lot left to be done when it comes to stopping offshore wind. CFACT will be active throughout this process. Stay tuned to see how it all plays out.

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