Gordon Hughes on offshore wind, Maine voters reject transmission, Sandhill Cranes

Gordon Hughes on offshore wind, Maine voters reject transmission project, Sandhill Cranes

I was in Florida yesterday for a speaking engagement with the National Electrical Manufacturers Association. It was fascinating to talk directly to so many manufacturers, nearly all of whom are wrestling with the supply-chain and labor-shortage issues that we've been hearing so much about. The engagement also gave me an opportunity to expound on some of the ideas I've developed about how the "return to nature" rhetoric of modern environmentalism mimics the ideas promoted by Rousseau more than 250 years ago. It was great to have such a warm and receptive audience. Also, as is my predilection, I took the opportunity to explore around the venue to see what birds might be about. I was rewarded with a trio of Sandhill Cranes.

At the moment, I’m sitting on a crowded airplane headed back to Austin. (Yes, managing Mailchimp at 35,000 feet. We live in an amazing world.) So let me get to it. Four things today:

• Gordon Hughes on the podcast: “green” jobs have “never been realized anywhere”

• New Forbes piece on Maine voters’ rejection of high-voltage transmission project

• Condensed video of my Senate testimony

• Sandhill Cranes on the golf course 

(I took the photo of the Sandhill Crane above with my mobile phone in Palm Beach Gardens on November 3, 2021.)

Gordon Hughes on the high cost of offshore wind, and the myth of "green" jobs

This week’s podcast (#77) features my chat with Gordon Hughes, a professor of economics at University of Edinburgh in Scotland who over the past decade or so, has spent a considerable amount of time studying the costs and performance of offshore wind energy. Hughes, who spent much of his career working on energy access issues at the World Bank, explained why the capital and maintenance costs of offshore wind energy projects are increasing, why the promise of  “green” jobs has “never been realized anywhere,” how land-use conflicts are halting the expansion of renewables in Europe, and why it is “profoundly dangerous” to believe we can run the world economy solely on renewables. 
 
I have been wanting to talk to Hughes for a long time and am thankful to Russell Pennoyer and Benny Peiser for facilitating an introduction to him. It was good conversation. Please share it. 

This morning, I published a piece in Forbes about a referendum that was on Tuesday's ballot in Maine. The result of the vote: 59% of the Mainers who cast ballots voted in opposition to a high-voltage transmission project that aims to carry hydropower from Quebec to Massachusetts. It’s another example of the land-use conflicts over renewable-energy projects that are happening all over the world. I began the piece this way: 

•  News coverage of Tuesday’s elections was dominated by Glenn Youngkin’s victory over incumbent Democrat Terry McAuliffe in the Virginia gubernatorial race. But when it comes to energy policy and climate action, the lopsided results of a referendum in Maine over a high-voltage transmission project proved yet again that land-use conflicts are the binding constraint on the expansion of renewables in the United States. It also showed that the myriad claims being made by politicians and climate activists that we can run our economy solely on renewables are based on nothing more than wishful thinking. On Tuesday, Mainers voted overwhelmingly – by a margin of 59% to 41% – to reject the New England Clean Energy Connect project which aims to move Canadian hydropower to customers in Massachusetts....Furthermore, the rejection of the project by Maine voters shows that the all-renewable scenarios that have been published over the past few years by academics from elite universities like Princeton, Stanford, and Cal-Berkeley – all of which depend on massive buildouts of high-voltage transmission capacity – are simply not feasible.

I then ran through the recent history of high-voltage transmission conflicts in Iowa and Arkansas, as well as the decade-long fight over the $2.3 billion, 780-mile Grain Belt Express, which has been delayed for years by opposition from rural residents in Missouri. I concluded:

• The punchline here is obvious. Tuesday’s vote in Maine, along with the opposition to similar transmission projects in Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, and other places, shows that building huge amounts of new high-voltage transmission won’t happen because rural Americans don’t want dozens of 120-foot-high pylons in their neighborhoods. Put another way, due to land-use conflicts, the electric grid of tomorrow will likely look a lot like the grid we have today.

Please give the piece a read and share it. 

Condensed versions of my October 27 Senate testimony

My friend, Gordon McDowell, kindly edited the video of my Senate testimony last week into some more bite-size chunks. (Thanks, Gordon). You can watch the two-minute version here. Gordon even inserted some of the graphics I submitted in my written testimony. He also edited the two-hour hearing down to a 10-minute version that includes my responses to questions from Sens. Lankford and Portman. It's available here.  
 

Antigone canadensis in Florida 

The meeting of the National Electrical Manufacturers Association was held at the PGA National resort in Florida. I’m not a golfer. As Mark Twain famously said, it’s a good walk spoiled. So with a few minutes to spare on Wednesday afternoon,  I went for a walk around the neighborhood. The ponds near the hotel had plenty of resident herons and egrets as well as several Egyptian Geese. After a while, I turned back toward hotel when I spotted a very tall bird near the croquet pitch. At first, given its size, I thought it might be a Whooping Crane. But I also knew that Florida is not part of the Whooper’s territory. So I walked over to investigate. As I got closer, I pulled out my phone and took a couple of photos. Then I walked a little closer and shot a couple more. The Sandhill Crane (Antigone canadensis) was clearly used to being around people and never alarmed or fled even though I got within about 20 feet. 
 
It’s a magnificent looking bird that is easily identified by its height (the one I saw was about three feet tall) and the shock of red on the top of its head. Some specimens may be as tall as four feet. I believe I’ve seen Sandhills before, but I’m a lazy list keeper and don’t recall where or when I may have seen them before. This sighting was memorable because of how close I was able to get to the bird without it being spooked. Last night, shortly before dusk, I took another walk, this one on the golf course. On the 8th hole, I spotted the pair of Sandhill Cranes. (See the photo above.) I was able to get even closer to the pair than I had to the single bird the night before. Again, they had clearly spent a lot of time around humans and didn’t spook easily. Instead, they kept a safe distance as I moved closer and took a few more snaps. 
 
I didn’t know much about Sandhill Cranes. I learned this from Wikipedia: It’s a “large crane of North America and extreme northeastern Siberia. The common name of this bird refers to habitat like that at the Platte River, on the edge of Nebraska's Sandhills on the American Plains. This is the most important stopover area for the nominotypical subspecies, the lesser sandhill crane (Antigone canadensis canadensis), with up to 450,000 of these birds migrating through annually.” It also said that Sandhill Cranes, “have one of the longest fossil histories of any extant bird. A 10-million-year-old crane fossil from Nebraska is said to be of this species but this may be from a prehistoric relative or the direct ancestor of Sandhill Cranes, and not belong in the genus Grus. The oldest unequivocal sandhill crane fossil is 2.5 million years old,  older by half than the earliest remains of most living species of birds, primarily found from after the Pliocene/Pleistocene boundary some 1.8 million years ago.”
 
There you have it: another dinosaur bird living happily among us, on the golf course, no less. Yet another reason why birds are so remarkable. 

Have a good weekend. 
 

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