Turbine Trouble: Ill Wind Blows for German Offshore Industry
The shift in the direction of political winds immediately affected the turbine builders. Several companies that were recruiting on a large scale only a few months ago are now laying people off. One company, Siag Nordseewerke, has filed for bankruptcy, and others could soon follow. The offshore boom has hardly begun, and yet it already seems to be over.
Half a dozen wind farms are still being built in the North Sea, but there are no follow-up contracts. “The market has collapsed,” says Ronny Meyer, the managing director of Windenergie Agentur (WAB), based in the northern port city of Bremerhaven. Riffgat developer EWE also doesn’t want to invest in additional offshore turbines.
From Boom to Bust
Until last year, the construction of wind farms was seen as an opportunity to regenerate Germany’s coast. Cities like Bremerhaven, Cuxhaven and Emden, ailing for years in the wake of declines in the shipbuilding and fishing industries, were booming. An estimated €1 billion ($1.3 billion) was invested in port facilities and factory buildings, and some 10,000 jobs were supposedly created. In Cuxhaven alone, the state of Lower Saxony invested €125 million ($165 million) in the harbor. Each square meter of the wharf can now support 90 tons, so that the turbine foundations can be loaded onto construction ships.
German Offshore Wind Industry Goes from Boom To Bust – SPIEGEL ONLINE
h/t to Dave G
Drudge links to you again today…sort of. Via Marc Morano via Iceagenow.com. Iceagenow quotes you but does not link you…
http://iceagenow.info/2013/08/unprecedented-july-cold-arctic-sees-shortest-summer-record/
This site is evil. Always criticizing the Messiah.
Aw, you’re not evil, just a little devilish.
Before not too long these things are going to start falling over from the wind and wave forces. Maintenance must be horrible and corrosion will win the day. The infrastructure connecting them to the shore will fail and the whole thing will be abandoned as no one will want to squander more money to take them down—most of them cannot be recycled. The governments may ordain wasting the money to create temporary jobs, but I bet the people will be pretty fed up with government’s spending habits by the.
I disagree with the major premise of the post: Obama hopes…..
He has no such hope. He damn well knows that Green Energy cannot and never will deliver the quality and quantity of energy necessary to sustain and advance our technological civilization. ALL “Green” sources of energy are simply too diffuse to deliver the goods. He is willfully and maliciously working to destroy the foundations of western civilization. The elimination of industrial quantities of cheap energy is one of the many ways he is working to achieve that destruction. For some insane reason, roughly half of We the People seem to agree with that pogrom even though they, more than the rest of us, are directly in the line of fire.
He does not mean well and never did.