By Steve Levy
A short article appeared in Newsday last month, announcing that New York state had canceled new wind power bids.
This was a big deal that required wider coverage. And then, two weeks later, another article appeared, with the headline that wind farms’ impact on average Long Island electric bills had increased near fivefold since 2019. This story spelled out what many of us had warned for years: The true cost of wind power is coming in at costs far higher than the initial low-balled estimates.
This is an enormous fall from grace for wind power, which was supposed to be the panacea for our costly energy needs.
Courts reversed President Trump’s decisions to halt wind projects that were already underway, and rightly so. But there was no such protection for newer projects.
These projects should have to rise and fall on their own merits, and for too long they were propped up by misinformation and huge ratepayer and taxpayer subsidies. We have long argued that the public was not getting a transparent accounting of what these offshore wind projects were going to cost.
In fact, the woke, virtue-signaling politicians in Albany were just signing off on these projects without even knowing how much they would cost. When then Gov. Andrew Cuomo boasted at a 2019 press conference that these massive new windmills would cost about 73 cents per month per customer, he was clearly drifting in the wind. It is estimated that by 2028, the true cost will average $3.54 per month. This is in addition to fuel, delivery and other increases that will come about. The impact on commercial users will be even greater.
So many of these pols simply wanted to placate the burgeoning wind power cottage industries — which showered them with substantial donations — and repeat the mantra that wind was clean and cheap and would save the day from fossil fuels. But as we now know, wind power isn’t cheap, and it’s not reliable.
Imagine if we didn’t have adequate natural gas capacity as we weathered this brutally cold winter.
Here’s what our center wrote two years ago about these potential costs, after Newsday reported that officials were signing off on these projects having no idea of their true costs:
“The head of the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, which oversees offshore wind contracts and bidding, admitted that she did not know what the total cost will be of the project for the construction of wind turbines off Suffolk County.”
You can’t make this stuff up.
“When asked by a Newsday reporter how much the ballyhooed Sunrise wind project will cost, she stated: ‘The total cost of the project, I defer to Orstad.’” Orstad is the private company constructing the offshore wind turbines.
When the spokesperson for that company was asked the cost, she had the temerity to state: “That’s something that publicly we do not share.”
Are you kidding us?
This isn’t to say that some wind projects could not be an important supplement to an “all of the above” strategy.
But our legislators were making dangerously foolish decisions to block natural gas pipelines and close down upstate nuclear power plants, all while banking on the idea that solar and wind were going to save the day. They wouldn’t, and they couldn’t.
When the true price of these windmills became known, people started clutching their pearls. These policies are partly responsible for our having seen a 50 percent increase in energy rates over the past five years in New York. See our center’s white paper on this subject at cenetrforcosteffectivegivernment.org.
Now the subsidies are gone, and wiser folks are saying “no more” until we can see that wind power is truly reliable and affordable. We can have more wind projects, but they must be cost-effective, and they cannot, at the present time, replace natural gas, either in cost or reliability.
The fantasy has finally come to an end.
Steve Levy is executive director of the Center for Cost Effective Government, a fiscally conservative think tank. He has served as Suffolk County executive, as a state assemblyman and as host of the podcast “On the Right Side.” He can be reached at steve@commonsensestrategies.com.
