| ▲ | ggm 6 hours ago |
| posted this at ars forum: (it should be clear I think it was a stupid move by the WH, but I am trying to think what might have "informed" it) Steelmanning the risks, its the link to mainland as a weakness in supply chain of power, compared to onshore sources possibly. But, the construction is in close water, well inside the exclusive economic zone. You would think passage of a craft capable of causing a power shock with an anchor chain was raising hackles well before this, because it's hugely unusual for a warcraft of another nation to be that close without an explicit permit. Under the Jones act, all inshore commercial craft delivering goods to and from named ports have to be US badged, for international shipping it's clear from the baltic there's a concrete risk, but that's a matter of policing the boats, not banning the structures at risk. A second steelman might be some belief about the intermittency. Thats easily knocked over because the system as a whole is building out storage and continuity systems, is adapting to a mix of technology with different power availability throughout the day, and of all the sources of power, wind is one of the most easily predicted to a useful window forward. You know roughly when a dunkelflaut is expected inside 48h, if you don't know exactly when, or for how long. Thats well north of the spin-up time for alternative (dirty) sources of power, if your storage capacity isn't there yet to handle it. |
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| ▲ | wattso 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| The pretext for the suspension was radar noise.[1] [1] https://www.nbcnews.com/business/energy/trump-offshore-wind-... |
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| ▲ | janice1999 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| US wind farms are 30 miles from the coast at most? No country is attacking that under some plausible deniability and it not being seen as an act of war.There are more important power lines further from civilisation running through rural areas in the US. These are not fiber cables a 1000 miles from the coast. Gas generators can be spun up to provide megawatts in seconds btw. With less than a quarter of the grid being renewable, intermittency is not an issue. Grids are built with resilience in mind (or at least should be...). |
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| ▲ | CGMthrowaway 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Treating offshore wind like ports and pipelines from a security POV makes sense, it's exactly what we do with offshore O&G. The rub is that securing offshore wind installations is an order of magnitude more resource-intensive than securing a deepwater rig, bc you're talking about a perimeter than spans 100's of square miles, not a single platform with a limited # of risers |
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| ▲ | defrost 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | From an attack PoV that's hundreds of square miles to destroy or disable many structures Vs taking out a single target. ie. They can nibble a bit at an array before you're onto them Vs everything gets thrown at a point source target. | | |
| ▲ | anonymousDan 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | What about some kind of mass underwater drone attack? Feels like it might be feasible in the not too distant future... | | |
| ▲ | ggm 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Is that especially simpler than e.g. an attack on the above ground cabling systems by firing carbon fibre conducting wires over them, as the US is said to have done in the Iraq war? Not that I don't think underwater drones are a future risk, but the belief its a risk which can't be mitigated, or a worse risk than ones which exist onshore, seems a bit weak. But none the less, yes. This would be a risk. Perhaps one which demands better drone detection and defence systems around wind turbines and O&G fields? | | |
| ▲ | wombatpm 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Aluminized Mylar streamers is what was used to take down the grid in Balkans back in the 90’s |
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| ▲ | defrost 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Say that it is .. it's still hard to near simultaneously take out all wind generators than to mass swarm (with a smaller number) a single platform, well head grouping, or onshore processing facility. Recall the context - a field of many wind generators Vs one or two platforms in order to "take down" a state's power grid. Ropes are strong because of many strands. | |
| ▲ | ssl-3 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | That would seem like either an excellent way to start a new war, or a galactically stupid way to try to end one. |
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| ▲ | ggm 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | If you wanted to defend an O&G field, wouldn't you need to consider a similar extent? per wellhead, yes. but the go to a concentrator for onshore feed don't they? or some kind of attached floating rig, which itself is a SPF. I thought fields had 100s of square km of extent too. The exclusion zone after nordstream is now pretty big, albiet "temporary" according to the web its 5 to 7 nm so 9 to 13 km so close to 100 km^2 | | |
| ▲ | CGMthrowaway 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | All of which are continually manned. Not so w/ offshore wind | | |
| ▲ | rootusrootus 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Don't wind turbines get serviced a few times a year? I would bet that on any given day there will be people at the farms. |
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| ▲ | mschuster91 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Treating offshore wind like ports and pipelines from a security POV makes sense No it does not. Even if you'd manage to disable an entire wind farm, the impact on the grid as a whole is negligible. An attacker has to spend a whole lot of effort on such an attack for very little, if any at all, gain. In contrast, shell a port or the right piece of infrastructure [1] and entire economies can get wrecked. And shell an oil rig... I mean, I seriously hope even the Russians don't sink that low but hey they did attack a goddamn NPP and a hydropower dam... anyway, taking out an oil rig risks an environmental disaster similar to Deepwater Horizon. That's a lot more effect for an opponent. The actual threat to wind farms is software. We've seen that in the early days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine - the Russians took down satellite modems [2], causing about 6000 wind turbines to lose their command infrastructure and thus stop generating power. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Scott_Key_Bridge_colla... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viasat_hack |
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| ▲ | cosmic_cheese 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Even if there were legitimate concerns surrounding defense of the wind farms, it makes more sense to instead de-risk with redundancy elsewhere, which is increasingly cheap and quick to do thanks to the combo of solar+batteries. That’s what we should be doing anyway if AI data center energy requirements are to continue to increase. |
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| ▲ | kentm 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I appreciate the sentiment behind steelmanning but Trump has had over a decade of publicaly, vocally hating windmills because some were built too close to his golf course. See https://www.npr.org/2013/07/01/196352470/thar-he-blows-trump... Its completely in-line with his personality to hold onto personal grievances for decades to the point that they become policy. |
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| ▲ | rootusrootus 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Its completely in-line with his personality to hold onto personal grievances for decades to the point that they become policy. I feel like much of what he does today can be directly attributed to the epic roasting he got from Obama at the correspondents' dinner. Most of us would be absolutely honored by being roasted by the sitting president, but he seemed at the time to take it very personally. | |
| ▲ | ggm 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The Judges appear to have responded to something specific. If it was made-up, they would have thrown the case out harder and sanctioned whoever submitted false evidence. So I assume somebody with an ability to legally bind intel into the right form was persuaded to say something. | | |
| ▲ | duskwuff 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Perhaps the objection started out with something fundamentally irrational or opinion-based, and someone was ordered to "reverse-engineer" an objection out of that which wasn't trivially refutable - e.g. "the noise from the turbines will keep our submarine sonar from working" or "reports say that human smugglers are hiding aboard the windmills" or whatever. | | |
| ▲ | ggm 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yes, I think thats very plausible. "inshore defense operations in an area of strategic importance will be excessively impeded by both development of this site, and future operations in ways which <REDACTED>" type thing. |
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| ▲ | maxerickson 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | In the quote in the article there, the one judge responds to something specific by calling it "irrational". |
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| ▲ | defrost 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | This is very much a root cause. Not just the fact that Scottish wind farms prevailed, also that he was relentlessly mocked, ridiculed, and protested against in unavoidably visible ways by the Scots. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NNWmZwObZc ( Note: while a recent youtube clip, the anti Trump protests in Scotland date back to well before his campaign for his first term as POTUS ) | | |
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| ▲ | aqme28 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I think that wind farms dotted along the entire US coast would be a bad target for crippling US power compared to a few coal/gas/nuclear mega power plants. |
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| ▲ | lovich 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Weird how these security risks only show up to tank projects in blue states |
