Mitsubishi Says Sayonara To Offshore Wind, Rahm’s Silliness, XOM Spotlights Power Demand, & Gratitude For One Year With Paid Subscribers On Substack

Four (free) notes on a Sunday afternoon

Giant wind turbines blighting a beach in Akita prefecture, Japan, in 2024. Credit: Reuters.

The only thing dumber than onshore wind energy is offshore wind energy. And over the past few months, the foolishness of offshore wind has become ever more apparent.

For the sake of brevity, I’m going to ignore the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to cancel offshore projects in US waters. Instead, I’ll focus on what’s happening overseas. On September 16, in Australia, the state of Victoria postponed its inaugural auction on offshore wind projects, “citing global investment hurdles.” Reuters explained the delay on the auction “deals another blow” to the offshore sector, “which is facing rising costs and regulatory hurdles, as well as market uncertainty.” That delay came just four days after the developers of the $8 billion Navigator North project located offshore Victoria announced they are putting their project on hold.

Last month, the German government announced it did not get a single bid in its latest offshore auction. Offshore magazine reporter Bruce Beaubouef had a good analysis of the auction:

This was Germany’s second offshore wind auction round so far this year. Both have been “no subsidy” auctions, and both have been unsuccessful. In this case, not a single offshore wind developer bid for either of the two sites N-10.1 and N-10.2 in the German North Sea. The auction, described as a “flop” by analysts, signaled that offshore wind power developers are wary of taking on riskier, zero-subsidy projects amid rising costs and supply chain issues. (Emphasis added.)

While the offshore fails in Australia and German offshore are notable, the most telling flop happened on August 27 in Japan, when industrial giant Mitsubishi Corporation announced it was withdrawing from three large offshore projects with a total capacity of 1.7 gigawatts. Reuters said the company was quitting the projects “because of soaring costs.” Mitsubishi was part of a consortium that won the contract for the offshore projects in late 2021.

Like other large industrial companies in Japan, Mitsubishi has very close ties to the Japanese government. The company has also been aggressive in its declarations about its efforts to reduce its emissions. Furthermore, offshore wind was supposed to be one of the pillars of Japan’s decarbonization push. By quitting the deal, Mitsubishi is signaling that Japan’s offshore wind ambitions are dead in the water.

For proof of that, consider the reaction to Mitsubishi’s announcement from the Renewable Energy Institute, a Japanese NGO that aims to “establish a society based on renewable energy.” The group was founded by Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son (net worth: $61.4 billion), who is the founder of SoftBank Group. On September 2, the NGO published a comment, which said “For a leading trading house to abandon projects of this scale — despite JPY20 billion [$135 million] penalty payments — is highly unusual in Japan.”

Let me translate that into English: One of Japan’s most influential think tanks, a group that’s backed by Japan’s richest citizen, is admitting that one of the country’s biggest and most influential corporations would rather pay $135 million in penalties than try to build three offshore wind projects where costs are spiraling out of control and return on its investment is unlikely.

It has taken a long time, too long, but the evidence from Australia, Germany, and Japan is clear: the offshore wind scam is running out of steam. I’ll end this section with a quote from my friend, David Turver, who publishes the excellent Eigen Values here on Substack. Today, in a piece on wind energy, he wrote, “it is crazy for a developed economy to try and run its electricity generation system using technologies that are dependent on the weather.”

Exactly right. And it’s even crazier to try to do that by putting that electricity generation system in saltwater. The offshore wind sector deserves to die. The sooner, the better.

Former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel in an undated photo: Credit: Reuters/NY Post.

Rahm Com

The leading Democratic contenders for the 2028 presidential race continue to bungle their messaging on energy policy. That’s true of California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who signed several measures last week that aim to reduce his state’s sky-high energy prices. As the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board noted, Newsom’s moves are designed to allow “more oil drilling and dirtier blends of gasoline in the state. Whatever happened to the climate emergency?”

Newsom isn’t the only Dem hopeful who’s fumbling for footing on energy. Last Thursday, presidential candidate (and former Chicago mayor) Rahm Emanuel published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal under the headline: “Big Electric Bill? Thank Trump.” Emanuel wants to blame soaring electricity prices — which he notes are up by about 10% since January — on the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. He wrote that the “new law’s supply cuts will ensure” that prices keep rising. He continued, saying that electricity demand is outstripping supply and that “ratepayers are being forced to swallow the costs,” and that Americans will realize “that Mr. Trump’s efforts to curtail electricity supply explain their mounting utility bills.”

What a load of flapdoodle.

As Isaac Orr and Mitch Rolling noted here on Substack on September 13, blaming the OBBBA for higher prices “is one of the most cynical and baseless claims wind and solar advocates could make because it’s not possible for a policy to impact electricity prices when it hasn’t even gone into effect.” (Emphasis in the original.) They continued, saying “The rising cost of electricity in America stems mostly from the ill-advised policy decisions made” before Trump returned to the White House, “which are now impacting Americans nationwide.”

Furthermore, Emanuel’s op-ed was a marvel for what it didn’t say. The former Obama aide claims that the ‘big opportunities to add power overwhelmingly come from clean sources of electricity.” He didn’t mention the raging backlash against Big Solar and Big Wind that’s happening across rural Illinois. As can be seen in the Renewable Rejection Database, more than 40 local communities in Illinois have banned or rejected solar and wind projects over the past few years.

Indeed, Big Solar and Big Wind are so unpopular that in 2023, the state legislature passed — and Democratic governor J.B. Pritzker signed — a measure that gives state-level bureaucrats in Springfield the power to override local zoning laws. Despite the measure, local communities continue rejecting solar and wind projects. Among the latest: On September 11, officials in Grundy County rejected a proposed solar project, “following recommendations from both the zoning board of appeals and land use committees.”

Emanuel also failed to mention Illinois’ insanely expensive Climate and Equitable Jobs Act, which was approved by Illinois’ General Assembly (controlled by Democrats) and signed into law by Pritzker in 2021. As Emmet Penney pointed out recently, that measure, which aims to zero out Illinois’ CO2 emissions by 2050, will force the closure of nearly 11 gigawatts of reliable coal-fired generation by 2030, which will mean “higher power prices and a less reliable electricity system.”

Nor did Emanuel mention how nuclear power is helping Illinois keep its power prices in check. I could go on. But suffice it to say that Emanuel’s op-ed is just more tomfoolery from Democratic hopefuls on energy. As Ruy Teixeira noted back in 2023, the “working class isn’t down with the green transition.” Unless or until top Democrats jettison their “clean” energy fetish and recognize that the overwhelming majority of Americans don’t give a flip about alt-energy and climate change, they will face an uphill battle in trying to reclaim the White House.

Exxon Mobil Spotlights Power Surge

In its latest global outlook, Exxon Mobil Corporation estimates that global energy demand will increase by 12% between 2024 and 2050. It also expects solar and wind production to grow rapidly, and that oil will “remain the largest source of primary energy, as it is essential for industrial manufacturing, including as a raw material and commercial transportation.”

While the overall findings are useful, the report itself is rather clunky for several reasons. First, the Texas-based energy giant continues to publish its data in quadrillion Btus. The International Energy Agency and Energy Institute publish their numbers in exajoules. It’s time for Exxon to abandon imperial measures and adopt SI units. Second, the spreadsheet that Exxon publishes with its outlook isn’t very useful. The IEA and EI publish more extensive data, including breakdowns by year, country, and region. Exxon only publishes its numbers in five- or ten-year increments, and only by region.

Now, with those criticisms out of the way, let me spotlight one of the most important projections from the new outlook.

As seen above, Exxon expects global electricity use to continue rising rapidly. That’s not surprising. Electricity has long been the world’s most-important and fastest-growing form of energy. As EI’s data showed in the latest Statistical Review of World Energy, global electricity generation jumped by 4% in 2024 alone. That’s far faster than the average 2.6% growth rate that occurred between 2014 and 2024. According to Exxon’s projections, between 2024 and 2050, global annual electricity demand will jump by 67% — or some 20,800 terawatt-hours per year — by 2050. The vast majority of that, some 16,600 TWh or 80% of that demand growth, will come from developing (non-OECD) countries.

A One-Year (Paid) Anniversary On Substack

A year ago this week, I announced that I was going to a paid subscription model here on Substack. The response has been truly heartening.

I love Substack. I am thrilled to be part of the new era of journalism that’s happening on this platform. Over the course of my career as a reporter, I have written for most of the name-brand legacy media outlets. But today, it’s clear that the corporate press is dying. Here on Substack, I can write what I want, how I want, when I want, with the charts, photos, and graphics that I choose. And I don’t have to ask for an editor’s permission to do so.

Now that I’m in my dotage, that freedom is particularly satisfying.

I’m thrilled to be writing on the same site as Matt Taibbi, a reporter whose work I admire. As he notes on his site, “subscriber support has made journalistic risk-taking possible on a scale staff writers in big organizations today can no longer imagine.” I agree with that 100%. I also like what another of my favorite Substack writers, Ted Gioia, said last year about this platform. “There’s something different about my relationship to the reader on Substack,” he said. “It’s more informal, more personal, less constrained by journalistic conventions.” I agree with that, too.

Headline from a September 16 article in Cowboy State Daily about one of the latest rejections of Big Wind in the US. The paper reported that “The Laramie County Board of Commissioners on Tuesday denied a controversial wind energy development proposal three times the size of Cheyenne after getting an earful from dozens of county residents opposed to the project. The Laramie Range Wind Project, backed by Spanish energy giant Repsol, had a long line of people speaking out against the project, claiming the up to 170 wind turbines could disturb local wildlife and become an eyesore. After a more than four-hour hearing, the commission voted the project down in a 3-1 vote.”

I am grateful to be on Substack because it shows that readers will support independent journalism that’s not constrained by the conventions that Gioia is talking about. I’m grateful because the revenue I earn here helps justify the time and effort involved in maintaining the Renewable Rejection Database, which is the only free, easily accessible database of its kind. As seen in the headline above, a 56,000-acre wind project was rejected last week by the Laramie County Board of Commissioners. That brings the total of wind projects rejected globally to 585.

Speaking of databases, I am excited to announce that later this week, I will be publishing an extensive new database that will only be available to paid subscribers. I don’t want to reveal too much. But this project takes a detailed dive into one of the hottest sectors in the power business. I think you will dig it.

Okay, it’s getting late on a Sunday afternoon. I will stop here by saying: Thank you for your support.

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