After the groundbreaking ceremony for Sunrise Wind, I zeroed in on one of the VIPs from Ørsted, the Danish company building the massive Long Island turbine project, to ask him how much it’s going to cost. Before he could answer, a PR flunky whisked him away, telling me to go ask the state.
As construction proceeded, nailing down a cost estimate was as elusive as getting a watt out of a turbine when the wind’s not blowing. Gov. Hochul and the politicians who caused electric rates to skyrocket under their Green New Deal said the multibillion-dollar Sunrise albatross would only add a few dollars to our monthly bills. Nobody believed them.
Now the truth comes out. The state is finally admitting that the cost to ratepayers will be more than five times what they initially reported. And even that number, deemed by state spin doctors as “levelized” over the course of the project’s 25-year lifespan, is suspect, given the rash of hidden costs and surcharges that will be extracted from Long Island residents. There will be renewable energy credits, renewable certificates, capacity charges, offshore wind subsidies, and other lulus that nobody in Albany likes to talk about when it comes to financing their wind energy dreams.
I had the occasion to ask the former head of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the federal agency that decides where offshore wind farms can go, why the Sunrise turbines are located 123 miles from where their transmission lines make landfall. The answer was convoluted and unsatisfactory. The fact is, the bureaucrats in Washington didn’t want them within sight of Long Islanders, who would have thought an array of 84 towers three times the height of the Statue of Liberty to be unsightly. This game of hide the turbines tacked an additional $400 million onto the project, if you even believe that number.
The calculators at the State Energy Office, Public Service Commission, Energy Research and Development Authority, and Department of Public Service, et al., can spin all they want, but the cost to ratepayers of the Sunrise white elephant can be easily calculated. Current estimates put the construction cost at $7 billion for a generating system expected to service 600,000 homes. That’s $11,666 per ratepayer. Amortized over 25 years, the monthly bill would be $38, far above the couple of dollars promised.
That’s just to build it. How much will it cost to operate the behemoth system miles out to sea? What about maintenance, repairs, decommissioning costs, carrying charges, hosting fees promised to local governments, and a profit for Ørsted investors?
New York sits atop a Saudi Arabia-sized supply of clean-burning natural gas. Wouldn’t it be easier and much less expensive to use that to supply our energy?