‘Inflation Reduction Act’ opens the door to expensive offshore wind in Georgia and Florida

According to Inside Climate News, the so-called “Inflation Reduction Act” opens the doors to expensive offshore wind facilities in Georgia and Florida by lifting a ten-year moratorium on offshore wind development.

This is unfortunate because the only people who benefit from offshore wind are the folks who sell the turbines and the government-approved monopoly utilities that make a fortune off of them by raising electricity prices for families and businesses.

Mitch Rolling and I have crunched the numbers on offshore wind on multiple occasions, and the results are always the same: the cost of using offshore wind vastly exceeds the cost of using existing coal, natural gas, and nuclear plants.

In our report, The High Cost of the Virginia Clean Economy Act, we determined that offshore wind is far more expensive than solar or onshore wind, costing more than $150 per megawatt hour.

In our modeling of offshore wind in North Carolina for the report Big Blow, we found offshore wind would cost between $137 per MWh and $164 per MWh, which makes offshore wind one of the biggest boondoggles out there for electricity generation.

Unfortunately, monopoly utilities have a powerful financial incentive to do irrational things, and the IRA will only make this perverse incentive structure worse by showering the wind and solar industries in more taxpayer money.

In the end, these subsidies will make electricity more expensive by propping up unrealible wind and solar installations.