Image: Vineyard Wind Offshore
As everything gets less affordable, republicans are proposing big new inspection fees for cheap energy projects, trying to protect their fossil fuel masters from the rise of better options.
Wind power is one of the cheapest and most environmentally friendly forms of electricity generation. And offshore wind is great, too, because wind blows more consistently on the ocean, and the land use of offshore wind projects is exactly zero – same with air quality impact, as it creates no pollution.
It’s a great method of cheap, secure domestic energy production, and particularly offers great options in the US Northeast, where wind resources are abundant (and where boat captains are looking for work, since fish stocks have been devastated by climate change).
And getting lots of cheap electricity production online is crucial right now, as energy bills of all types rise due to increased demand from data centers and an idiotic oil war that has intelligent countries looking for better options away from fossil fuels. Countries that have excess energy available will benefit at a time like this, in a world where so much consumption is moving to electrification and AI.
So of course, all of those good things mean that the republican party has to do everything it can to stop it. Because it just wouldn’t do to have better clean energy options when there are fossil fuel interests to protect.
As such, they’ve conducted many efforts over recent years to attack this superior form of electricity production. The Department of the Interior cut off 400k homes worth of power just before Christmas, tried to pause new leases and halt existing constructions, tried to make permitting harder (while fast-tracking dirty projects with “concierge” service), and bribed a foreign oil company a billion dollars from taxpayer coffers to get them to build a polluting oil project instead of a wind farm. Many of these efforts were stopped by courts, and some are still in courts.
Notably, the squatter at the head of the Interior Department responsible for the above actions, Doug Burgum, has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes from the oil & gas industry over his political career.
But that’s not enough for them, republicans want to attack clean, cheap energy even more.
Newest attack puts huge annual fees on wind farms
The latest attack comes in a new spending bill (the “INTERIOR, ENVIRONMENT, AND RELATED AGENCIES APPROPRIATIONS BILL”) for the Department of the Interior which would add huge new fees to wind power projects, far in excess of those that oil companies pay.
It was recently released by the Appropriations committee, chaired by Tom Cole (R-OK), who received hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes from the oil industry in just the last campaign cycle.
Fees would amount to $7,300 for an onshore visit to a wind farm’s control center, $15,400 to visually inspect a wind turbine, and $72,800 for a full physical inspection of a turbine. These would need to be paid annually.
Notably, these latter two costs are per turbine, and wind farms can have upwards of 100 turbines on them. It could cost millions of dollars to get one official to take a helicopter trip to look at the turbines on a wind farm, which would then increase the cost these wind farms have to charge for electricity.
The fees would not just apply to wind projects that are yet to be proposed, but to ones that are already in service and providing cheap energy to the grid, thus increasing costs on investments that were already made.
Wind fees higher than oil platform fees, despite danger
They are also much higher than inspection fees for offshore oil platforms. While the amount paid varies widely depending on the type of platform, even the most complex platform does not pay as much as the $72,800 physical inspection fee for the turbine. And fees for oil platforms are not being raised by the bill in question.
The difference is stark when taking into account the complexity of these platforms. A wind turbine has relatively few parts – one tower coming out of the water, three blades, and some electronics and motors inside the housing. An offshore oil platform has thousands of pipes and hoses and even housing to accommodate workers. That’s a much more complex inspection.
And it’s even more stark when recognizing the environmental damage that can be done. If an offshore wind turbine suffers catastrophic failure, you’ll get some debris that falls to the bottom of the ocean, and becomes a home for fish (along with some leaking lubricant oil from the gears). If an oil platform suffers catastrophic failure, you could have 4.9 million barrels of oil that leak over the course of 5 months, affecting 68,000 square miles, doing tens of billions of dollars worth of damage and harming coastlines more than a decade later.
Similar to the recent effort to put an unfair tax on EVs while letting gas cars get away scot-free, this seems an effort to hike fees on the superior option and ignore the damage done by the dirty one that happens to be pushed by the richest and most evil industry the world has ever seen – which has deep pockets to give the sorts of bribes that were legalized by a republican court.
The bill is not yet law, and has to be advanced through committee and voted on by the full House. It could be amended before then, but boring spending bills can often sail through. And unlike previous efforts, this could likely not be stopped by courts, since it will be part of a law passed by Congress.
So, if you want electricity to be less expensive, call your reps here and tell them your thoughts on the new wind fees in the Interior spending bill.
Notably, every single representative in the House is up for re-election just five months from now. If you prefer to have lower electricity prices and less pollution, it should be obvious what to do.
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