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...right-wing media figures and climate deniers have used the cancellation of two major wind projects that were set to be built off the coast of New Jersey to make misleading claims about renewable energy as a whole. In addition to falsely claiming that there is evidence offshore wind projects are killing whales, they are using the project challenges to misleadingly attack the Biden administration’s climate agenda and argue against renewable energy subsidies.

On October 31, Danish global offshore wind developer Orsted announced it would be canceling Ocean Wind 1 and 2, citing high inflation, rising interest rates, and a choked supply chain.

Some right-wing media are calling the scrapped projects a “tremendous winfor all New Jerseyans,” even though they would have provided 15,000 jobs. Ocean Wind 1 and 2 would have also provided2.2 gigawattsof electricity to 1 million homes to help meet the Biden administration’s goal of deploying 30 gigawatts of offshore wind energy by 2030. It would have also helped New Jersey meet its goalof reaching 100% clean energy by 2035.

Below are some examples of how bad actors spun the setback to deride renewable energy and omitted important facts and context:

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the renewable-power fantasy is being blown apart by furious financial headwinds.

Already this year projects have tumbled in Rhode Island, Connecticut and Massachusetts, and now Danish wind-power giant Ørsted has canceled two wind farms in New Jersey.

Over and over, the litany of causes is the same: inflation, higher interest rates that drive up capital costs and severe kinks in the supply chain.

These same problems are slamming proposed offshore-wind projects in New York as developers make final decisions on whether to start building turbines or cut their losses before they get worse.

Seeing that the wild cost increases threaten to make their projects unprofitable, these companies went hat-in-hand to the state’s Public Service Commission asking for increases of 35% to 65% on the price of electricity they hope to generate.

But the commission declined to dig deeper into ratepayers’ wallets, sending them away empty-handed.

The four companies behind these prospective wind farms have all taken big hits to their balance sheets. Equinor has written its value down by $300 million.

Danish wind-power company Ørsted recently canceled two planned wind farms in New Jersey.Photo by Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images

Its partner, BP, wrote off more than $500 million. Eversource sliced $300 million off its portfolio’s value.

And Ørsted took a sledgehammer to its accounts, wiping out a whopping $5.6 billion. Its stock plunged more than 20%.

All this chaos caused a top BP executive to lament that the offshore-wind industry is “fundamentally broken.”

Indeed — and yet this broken industry is what New York’s climate activists have pinned their clean-energy hopes on.

If offshore wind had to compete on the free market, we wouldn’t even be talking about it.

The levelized cost of energy from natural gas is around $37 per megawatt hour.

The contracts the wind-energy companies struck with the state sets offshore wind’s price at $118 per megawatt-hour, three times as expensive as gas but still not enough to make turbines turn a profit.

To get out of the red, the firms had begged the PSC to jack up the price to between $140 and $190 per megawatt-hour.

These wind farms will almost certainly be built someday, even if the current contract-holders back out and the state has to rebid them.

SEE ALSO

EDITORIAL

### The wheels are coming off New York’s insane alternate-energy plans

And if it does, every bidding company will demand higher prices, socking ratepayers across the state with higher bills to subsidize them.

This is the danger of letting the government pick winners and losers. Watch the show “Shark Tank,” and you’ll see real investors having to decide whether to risk their own bankroll.

When experienced people are playing with their own money, they don’t care whether an idea sounds exciting or ticks the proper ideological boxes. They only care whether they’re likely to make money off it.

But when government provides subsidies to businesses, the investment decisions are made by folks who get to play with other people’s money.

Not having anything of their own at stake dulls their judgment, making them care more about the ideological appeal of a proposal than whether the money picked from the public’s pocket will provide a real return on their (unwilling) investment.

And while an investor will walk away from a project that’s going down the tubes, government agencies will keep throwing good money after bad — there’s no cost to them, and it hurts to publicly admit you’re wrong.

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What do you think? Post a comment.

New Yorkers are capable of choosing the future they want. They don’t have to have it forced on them. Many do want clean energy and are willing to pay a premium for it, but only if it doesn’t come at an outrageous price.

It’s time to shove the cost-immune policymakers to the side and let the market work. Let firms innovate to find affordable sources of clean energy, and climate conscious New Yorkers will beat a path to their door.

*James Hanley is a fellow with the Empire Center for Public Policy.

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the e International Energy Agency recentlyreported that shifting to clean energy will create between 13 and 26 million jobs by 2030. They present this as a benefit, but that’s misleading; jobs are not a benefit but a cost.

That might sound counterintuitive, but it’s easy to understand. Say you need to do repairs on your home, and you can’t or don’t want to do them yourself. That means you have to pay for both materials and labor. But imagine that the materials would magically assemble themselves into the needed repair work all on their own. Then you would only have to pay for materials, and you would save the cost of hiring someone.

This is true for any business as well. Suppose the elements of their business could magically assemble themselves into the finished product or service. The business owner could then avoid spending on employees and pass some of that savings on to customers. That’s why automation has replaced so many laborious tasks over time, from agriculture to washing clothes to taking orders at fast-food restaurants.

Can you save the cost of labor by doing your own repair work on your home? No, because your time has value. The time and energy spent doing the home repair can’t be spent on something else, whether that something else is a money-making activity or just leisure. That’s the opportunity cost of your labor, the lost opportunity to do the next most valuable thing with your time, whetherfor you that’s doing something that makes money or just enjoying some leisure time. Even if you find working on your home pleasurable, there’s still an opportunity cost. If that cost is high, then it’s worth hiring someone else. If it’s low, it may make sense to do the work yourself. But either way, there’s a cost.

But aren’t jobs a benefit to the person who has the job? No. They are no more a benefit than your labor on your own home is a benefit. The income is the benefit, and the job is the cost you pay to get the income. That’s easy to see if you imagine getting the same income without having to work for it. Consider why nobody talks about what job they’ll have in heaven. Our standard picture of heaven is that we have all our needs taken care of without doing any work. All our time is leisure time. That vision implicitly recognizes that having a job is a cost. It may be a necessary cost here on earth, but it is nonetheless a cost.

Which brings us back to green jobs. The International Energy Agency suggests that creating millions of jobs in clean energy is a benefit, but now you should see that these jobs are really a cost. You can see this more clearly by thinking about who pays that cost. After all, someone has to pay for all that labor. And that someone is the public. Imagine how much cheaper the transition to clean energy would be if it required fewer jobs, so the public didn’t have to pay for as much labor. Then the clean energy policies would have even more net value.

And if such a loss of jobs in the energy sector were to occur, it would not mean a net loss of jobs. Instead, those workers would become available for employers in other sectors of the economy to hire. Then for the same amount of labor, we would get both green power and whatever other goods and services those workers would end up providing for us. So if government wanted to craft a truly economically beneficial clean energy policy, it would devise one that requires fewer workers in the energy industry.

Government is not needed to create jobs. The private sector does that on its own and does it best when government stays out of the way. Consider that the U.S. population has tripled in the past century while at the same time automation has eliminated countless jobs. Yet, in the years just before the Covid-19 pandemic, the unemployment rate was historically low. Or consider automated checkout in grocery stores that has reduced the number of cashiers. Naively one would expect a reduction in grocery store employment. Instead, those workers have shifted to tasks like shopping for customers who then come to the store just long enough to pick up their order. Freeing up labor from one job makes them available for new tasks that nobody could do for us in the past.

Government policies that “create” jobs – green or any other color – are not adding to the total number of jobs. They are only shifting them away from other economic sectors. And they can only do so by offering higher wages, which are paid for by us members of the public. So once again, those jobs are a cost of the policy, not a benefit.

This isn’t an argument against clean energy. This is an argument that jobs are not a reason to favor clean energy. If we have decided to transition to clean energy for environmental reasons, then we should hope for clean energy that requires fewer jobs. That would be a real benefit.

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