8-29-25 - 6am - Revolution Wind

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Michael Miguel. Hey, that was some scintillating radio. Listen to
how you guys possibly receive your mail? Seven eight minutes
of it just and you guys are just oh, it
was just a high wire I'm telling you the intelligence
factor there. I slept for two good hard hours after that.

Speaker 2 (00:21):
Thanks.

Speaker 3 (00:24):
Part of the mission statement of this program is to
protect and serve. We stole it from the cops and
to the extent that we protected you from other insanity
going on in the world, and we gave you a
good night's sleep, at least a good two hour nap.
Then our mission has been fulfilled and we're quite happy

(00:46):
about that. And man, you know what, I was going
to do a serious commentary about radio and our truth
philosophy about doing this program.

Speaker 2 (01:00):
Yeah, I just yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:03):
Why start now?

Speaker 2 (01:04):
Yeah? Exactly.

Speaker 3 (01:05):
If if you don't get it about what we do here,
then it's it's it's well, I will say this about
what we do here, I think and I can't what
do we do here? Well, I'm not gonna I never
said what we do here? Why we do what we do?

Speaker 5 (01:27):
Well?

Speaker 3 (01:27):
The why of what we do here is a reflection
of and again I can't speak for Dragon, but I
speak for myself, and I speak for myself, and Dragon
can chime in anytime he wants to, which he normally does,
and it just irritates the fire out of me because
I'm usually on some magnificent, amazing point that is so
incredibly wise, intelligent and smart that he just derails it completely.

(01:51):
But well probably most of like to his point, most
of yesterday, you know, as he said it was scintillating,
which I'm just glad that we have somebody in the
audience that knows the words scintillating.

Speaker 4 (02:02):
I mean that's he still can't spell it, though, Oh
he can't spell it.

Speaker 3 (02:05):
Oh okay, well wait a minute, he can't spell it,
or our transcription service can't sell it, neither of us.
Scintillating s C I N T I L L A
T I n G something like that. The philosophy of
this program is this the way I like to live life.
There is so much serious bulk wrap going on in

(02:29):
the world that we could literally spend four hours a
day Monday through Friday, three hours every Saturday doing nothing
but serious, serious, serious stuff. And because again not speaking
for Dragon, except I kind of him in this case,
considering We are both passive aggressive.

Speaker 2 (02:49):
We both like to laugh at ourselves.

Speaker 3 (02:53):
And at other people in the world and the world
and at things. Every once in a while it's good to,
you know, laugh at something or do something that's just inane, insane, absurd.
And you can't tell me, Well, maybe you don't work,

(03:14):
Maybe you don't work for a corporate giant like we do.
And so maybe you get your mail delivered every single
day through the little slot in your door, and you
run and pick up all your you know, your flyers
for all of the ads and all the freebies and
stuff that or all the sales pitches or you know,
the best the ones I like right now that we
seem to be getting a lot of, primarily I guess

(03:34):
because of age. Is Hey, come to a free state
dinner at Shanahan's. You know that's what it says on
the envelope. Free free meal at Shanahan's. Of course you
open it up. What is it, you'll have to sit
for three hours and listen to somebody try to sell
you an annuity or time share.

Speaker 2 (03:54):
Yeah, yeah it is. It's timeshare.

Speaker 3 (03:56):
It's we should we should start have what what's that
guy's name, Lesley Financial?

Speaker 2 (04:02):
On Fox News. I think, so, yeah, you know he's.

Speaker 3 (04:06):
Now doing They're now selling, they're reselling bandwidth from cell towers.

Speaker 2 (04:12):
They got some cell phone company now.

Speaker 4 (04:14):
Too, because why not?

Speaker 3 (04:15):
Well, well listen, good for him, entrepreneur, go for it.
You realize, though, that when you buy from those other
companies that lease or buy bandwidth from those cell towers,
that when the people who actually like T Mobile is
my carrier, because Verizon one day just decided to double

(04:35):
my bill and I called him and said, what's this about?

Speaker 2 (04:38):
You're right with them? Okay, duh, I think I can
I can see I can see that.

Speaker 3 (04:44):
Can you explain to me why, because you know that's
not what I signed up for. Well, we just increased
our rates. Okay, bye bye, T Mobile.

Speaker 2 (04:52):
Hello.

Speaker 3 (04:53):
And I picked T Mobile primarily because at the end
disclosed location, there's a T Mobile tower right across the
river from us.

Speaker 2 (05:00):
Awesome.

Speaker 3 (05:00):
Yeah, so I picked T Mobile And so far they've
been fine. There's one little dead spot in Islands Ranch
that lasts about five seconds. But if I'm using T
Mobile and T mobiles, uh, towers get overwhelmed. And you're
buying from a third party that uses those towers, you

(05:21):
get throttled. I don't so, I've never understood that Exfinity,
consumer Cellular whatever they know what what's this guy's name,
red Red, Red Flag.

Speaker 2 (05:33):
Or something mobile? I don't know what it is, but yeah,
I don't get it.

Speaker 3 (05:38):
And Ted Dance and whatever, Ted Danson says that I
think he's and then Ryan Reynolds does it.

Speaker 4 (05:43):
Ryan Reynolds have one? Yeah, I mean there's there's a
bazillion of them. I don't I don't care whether you
use those or not, but I don't use them.

Speaker 3 (05:53):
How do we get off of that? I am an idiot,
and I freely admit that, Oh, today's not the day
to play that. Today's just not the day to play that.
That's not what I want to hear today. I am
the dumbest son of a bitch.

Speaker 2 (06:13):
I don't want to hear that one either. Today is Friday,
August twenty.

Speaker 4 (06:18):
Ninth, And what would you prefer this one?

Speaker 3 (06:22):
Dragon is the greatest producer I've had in seventeen years already. Well,
as long as Angie's not listening, you can play that
all you want to.

Speaker 4 (06:31):
Yes, you kick my ass, that's right.

Speaker 3 (06:34):
If Angie's listening, notes you, but you will slaughter both
of us. Right, that's right, we're both deadbeat. This week
the government slammed the brakes. They cut the towers down
on a nearly completed project off the Rhode Island and
Connecticut coast called Revolution Wind. Wow, that was some sixteenth

(06:58):
Street mall m A U L the Revolution Wind. Their
reasoning cited vague national security concerns. Forty five out of
sixty five turbines were already piercing the ocean floor, and
the developer was out there slapping himself on the back

(07:18):
talking about how they were nearing eighty percent completion, and
then suddenly boom got to stand down. Whether probably some
no pun intended here, some deeper issues, or is this
another sign that the whole concept of offshore wind is
a house of cards that's just collapsing. Well, I'll let

(07:40):
you decide for yourself. Little background. Revolution Wind is owned
by a foreign company or Stead. It's the voted offshore
brainschild of or Stead. It works fifteen miles south of
Rhode Islands coast, and it's supposed to feed power to
Rhode Island and Connecticut, Connecticut. I think they were going

(08:03):
to be up to sixty five turbans two substations. They
promised seven hundred megawatts. That's enough for I would say
probably seven hundred megawats. I'm gonna guess somewhere between two
hundred and fifty and three hundred and fifty thousand homes,
but that's probably putting some spin on it. Connecticut grabs

(08:26):
three hundred megawatts and Rhode Island grabs four hundred megawatts,
all locked in at nine point eight cents a kilowatt
hour for the next twenty years. Is that cheaper than
New England's retail average.

Speaker 2 (08:46):
Yes, but.

Speaker 3 (08:50):
That's only if you ignore the incredible massive subsidy that
you Now. I'm not talking to anybody that's listening to
me in Rhode Island or Connecticut right now, I'm talking
to everybody in Colorado or all the surrounding states or
anywhere else that you listen. You subsidize that because when
you pile in the massive subsidies that are propping it up,

(09:13):
you realize that nobody's saving any money. On this picture,
this massive steel monopiles twelve twelve meters wide for the turbines, turbines,
fifteen substations, all just hammered into the sea bed like
industrial spikes. And everyone gets a rock apron that devours

(09:36):
almost a full acre. I think it's like technically it
zero point seven acres or something. They're stacked two to
four feet high so that they can fight off erosion.
The total toll for that one hundred and ninety acres
of mangled seabed across the ninety seven thousand acre lease.
Then you put in one hundred and fifty five miles
of inter array cables forty two miles. Now that's just

(10:00):
in the complex of all the turbines. And then you
add to that forty two miles to the shore that's
buried four to six feet deep, which again scars the
ocean floor. This isn't clean energy. This is what we
would look at and go, oh, look, it's an industrial park,

(10:22):
except this one happens to be buried underwater where you
can't see it now. Before and during construction, the project
carried out high resolution geophysical mapping, geotechnical borings, and they
spent years monitoring runs to track seafloor conditions. You don't
want to go start putting something on the seafloor if

(10:44):
it's always shifting.

Speaker 2 (10:45):
You got problems.

Speaker 3 (10:46):
So they had to do all of this tracking of
the seafloor to see if it was going to work.
Then they scour around the foundations and they bury the cable.
All the regulators, all the little government bureaucrat regulators, anticipated
survey activity during construction, intermittent surveys across the life of
the project, in addition to round the clock pile driving

(11:10):
windows when the weather allowed. Offshore wind can claim the
Federal Investment Tax credit thirty percent of your capital costs,
so whatever it costs, you know, it costs one thousand
dollars at amy capital costs one thousand dollars per unit

(11:34):
of whatever. You and I are paying three hundred dollars
of that thirty percent. And then projects that meet domestic
content rules, you know, your your materials, workers, everything, just
domestic content, you can add a ten percent bonus to that,
so thirty percent. You can add another ten percent, so

(11:55):
you know, ye're up to forty percent, So that thousand dollars.
Depending on the content of everything, you could actually be
subsidizing it up to four hundred dollars. Now, just to
give you a comparison, a project can choose the production
tax Credit, which pays a set amount for every killow
hour for the next ten years. At today's rate, that's

(12:16):
about two point seven two point seven five cents a
killo what hour. So a seven hundred megawat project that
runs near a mid forty percent capacity factor would generate
I calculate on the order of two point eight billion
kilowa hours a year, making the ten year value of
that production tax credit.

Speaker 2 (12:39):
Alone, just that alone.

Speaker 3 (12:42):
Is seven hundred and fifty million dollars, just in nominal terms,
three quarters of a billion dollars. Which path of particular
project elects is obviously a choice based on your finances,
but the scale of the federal help is never in doubt.

(13:05):
So in all of your calculations about the cost of
the project, you know that in this one over a
ten year span, you know, for a life of the system,
you can calculate that, Oh, whatever my capital costs are,
I'm going to get three quarters of a billion dollars,
I'm going to get seven hundred and fifty million.

Speaker 2 (13:23):
Dollars of that back, not back, just up front.

Speaker 3 (13:28):
Because it's not back, it's you don't get on the
back end, you get it on the front end. So
who really gets what? From Washington? Here is a chart
that I found at federal energy subsidies. The federal subsidies
per unit of electricity generated between twenty ten and twenty

(13:53):
nineteen US dollars per megawatt hour. Solar gets eighty two
dollars and forty six cents, gets eighteen dollars and eighty
six cents, geothermal gets nine dollars and eighteen cents, Nuclear
gets a dollar ninety three, cold gets seventy three cents,
hydropower gets fifty three cents, oil and gas gets thirty
nine cents.

Speaker 4 (14:13):
Hmm.

Speaker 3 (14:14):
So there's a little perspective for you. Now, the Feds,
at the same time they're yanking this, are now yanking
approval for the wind project in Maryland. Once hyped power
almost a million Actually, I was gonna say in the
million homes. I think it was like seven hundred and
fifty thousand homes. Is that a coincidence that they're Yankee

(14:37):
net or is it proof that offshore wind bubble is
beginning to burst? Because the halt in all of this
funding by the Feds seems to indicate that everything that
we've talked about before about offshore wind low power density, demands,
sprawling set ups, the trash habitats. Offshore wind looks good
in slogans, but it fails in the real world. The

(15:00):
source is low empowered density. What do I mean by that?
It needs wide spacing. It spreads machines across the waters
that are still living habitats. If you want the full
walk through and you look at powered density, you can
look at you know, the footprint of an oil and

(15:23):
gas well, or the footprint of a coal mine, which
you know, pronominally is underground, the footprint of a nuclear
power plant, and those footprints are a lot smaller than
what it is for a footprint of something for a
wind farm, same is true generally speaking for solar farms too.
You have the surface warming problem because if you have

(15:47):
a very large wind and solar project that you build up,
that changes local temperature, especially at night, which then that
cuts the promise that these projects are going to cool
the surface. That was one of the claims. Yeah, these
will cool the surface somehow by using wind and solar.
Not only is it green energy, but that's going to

(16:08):
help stop global warming, which we know is really not
happening anyway. But probably anytime we talk about this, you
got to follow the money because when a technology, wind
or solar, whatever it is, when it can't stand on
its own without long term guarantee prices and rich and
federal credits.

Speaker 2 (16:29):
What happens.

Speaker 3 (16:32):
If you're an investment banker, if you are a lender
of any sort, an individual, an institution, whatever it might be,
and somebody comes to you with the technology and in
this case it's offshore wind and it cannot survive, It

(16:53):
cannot be financially viable without guaranteed prices and federal subsidies.
If you're a private investor, again, institutional or individual, what
are you going to do? You're not going to invest
in it because you're looking at it and going, wait,

(17:13):
wait a minute, this is not a standalone project that
has a return on investment outside the fact that you're
getting taxpayer money and you are guaranteeing prices. You can't
which guarantee prices, and you're going to depend on the

(17:34):
federal government to always have these subsidies, Then no, I
don't want to invest in that. So taxpayers are asked
to step in. Let's break down the economics, Let's break
down the risk. Let's figure out who pays when financing,

(17:54):
because well, you're going to find out just who it is.

Speaker 5 (17:57):
You're not gonna like it, jes Age Christ Michael Breeze.
It's surely relaxed, sweet wounded Jesus.

Speaker 3 (18:15):
I didn't say it. He said it, So don't start
switching over to a music station simply because he said it.

Speaker 4 (18:25):
Well, that's not the reason I'm switching to a music station.

Speaker 3 (18:32):
I'm wound up today. Well, I'm wound up today for
a lot of reasons, right, dragon, there's a lot of
reasons why I'm wound up. We're gonna talk about it.
Let me finish the wind stuff, gotcha. We might do that, Yeah, yeah,
because I'd be more interested in hearing what you have
to say to them, what I have to say, because
I know what I have to say, and nobody really

(18:53):
cares what I have to say. They only care what
you have to say, and nobody did twenty years ago,
twenty years I'm my gosh, and I was man. I
was fat. I was about two twenty to twenty five.

Speaker 4 (19:08):
But you had dark hair.

Speaker 3 (19:10):
I had hair. What do you mean dark hair? You know,
I just had hair. I still had my advanced hair.

Speaker 4 (19:16):
Hair, right, that's still there.

Speaker 2 (19:17):
Yeah, but I need to get advanced hair to go
back here. Now that's right me.

Speaker 3 (19:21):
Oh, they could use that as a solar panel back there.
Probably I could put a solar panel back there and
generate mon electricity.

Speaker 4 (19:27):
Too bad, they can't do anything about your face.

Speaker 2 (19:32):
Well, you have a lot of room to talk.

Speaker 4 (19:35):
Took, My face is covered.

Speaker 3 (19:36):
Why are we both in radio exactly? There are a
lot of observers that are trying to blame the collapse
of offshore wind on this change in federal policies, the elimination
of the grants, all of that. But I think the
reality is a lot more complicated than that, And I

(19:57):
think Orstead and this Evolution Win project is a great
example of that. Orstead made news several times over the
past week, but they made news on Monday when their
stought fell precipitously following its receipt of the stop work
order that impacted that Revolution Win project off the coast

(20:18):
of Rhode Island that was issued by the Department of Interior.
BOI says they issued the stop work order to quote
address concerns related to the protection of national security interests
of the United States and prevention of interference with reasonable
uses of exclusive economic zones the high seas and the

(20:41):
territorial seas. This is the second time in two weeks
that this company and this particular project had a major blow.
There was an analyst from Sidbank that toad Reuters this
is a huge hurdle with regards to raise capital. I've
experienced a lot in my twenty years as a stock analyst,

(21:05):
but this tops it all.

Speaker 2 (21:07):
I'm stunned. Well why now.

Speaker 3 (21:11):
Or Stat has been a big newsmaker in offshore winds,
particularly in the United States, but it's far from the
only company that's experiencing issues like project viability.

Speaker 2 (21:27):
Now, no doubt the.

Speaker 3 (21:28):
Trump policy reforms have had a significant impact. You've got
to admit that. But the problems with this country go
back for years. Give you an example. In twenty twenty three,
right in the middle of the Biden Administration's pushed to
you know, kind of rush to do all this offshore
wind development before voters could have a matter say in
the matter about either locally or nationally, or said announced

(21:50):
that it was abandoning two win projects offshore New Jersey.
So what happened at the end of last week and
early this week is nothing new. Back in twenty twenty three,
they abandoned two other projects so, in conjunction with Orsted's

(22:14):
decision to walk away from ocean Wind one and two,
the company was forced to sustain a write down of
more than four billion dollars. If if this company had
to do a write down of four billion dollars, it
would probably go out of existence. There are probably a
lot of medium sized public detraded companies like iHeart that

(22:37):
do all sorts of things, you know, some manufacture, some
service industries, whatever it might be. You suddenly have a
four billion dollar write down, You're probably not in chapter eleven.
You're probably in chapter seven. The CEO of Orstet at
the time, mad Snipper, said the company was also going
to set aside another one and a half billion dollars

(22:59):
to cover potainial contract cancellation fees not already covered by
the impairments. So their total write down, including what they
actually wrote off plus what the amount they were setting aside,
total more than five and a half billion dollars.

Speaker 2 (23:15):
The finances just aren't there.

Speaker 3 (23:18):
In February of last year, BP was also struggling trying
to make a go of its offshore wind ventures for
more than two decades, and after two decades, BP took
a one point one billion dollar write down related to
the projects they had going on in the United States.
They sold steaks in two projects, the Empire Win one two.

(23:41):
They were operated by some Norwegian firm. I don't remember
the name of it, I just remember it was Norwegian.
And then they announced that they had halted development plans
for a third project off the coast of Massachusetts. Finally,
funny called, in my opinion humorously Beacon Win a Beacon
Hill in Boston. Yeah, well they shut that down, or

(24:04):
they halted development plans. They actually hadn't started operating equinor
that's that's the Norwegian firm. They tried to bring the
Empire Wind project offshore New York to completion, but they
took back in January a nine hundred and fifty five

(24:25):
million dollar hit when the Interior Department issued a stop
work order similar to what they had done to Orsted
they did to this Norwegian firm. BP's fellow British major
oil company Shell took a one billion dollar charge this
past February after it just walked away from its efforts

(24:48):
to develop the Atlantic Shores project off the New Jersey shore.
That came two months after Shell decided in December of
last year that it would no longer take the lead
in developing new wind projects. Now, if you're a critic,
the easy thing to do is to put all this

(25:09):
blame on Trump. But you can't blame Trump for Shells
announcement in March of last year that it was going
to abandon that stake in Ocean Winds Project offshore Massachusetts,
because that was because that was really because of prevailing
market conditions including well remember inflation, all the supply chain issues,

(25:30):
and just simple which is always the last thing to mention,
but I think should be the first thing to mention,
the non viability of the project's business plan. Now, yes,
there's no doubt that Trump's policies are having an impact
on offshore wind in this country, but you can't blame
them for the industry's ongoing struggles that go back to

(25:52):
the heart of the Biden years. Grid Managers has something
called ISO New England. They had some projects going on.
They responded to the Interior Departments work order stop work
order with a kind of a plaintive statement. They came
out complaining that the administration's action posed a threat to

(26:14):
the grid's reliability. At the same time that there's a demand,
a rise in demand, increase in demand. But you can't
blame Trump for the last twenty years of increasing reliability
issues on the New England grid because policy makers egle

(26:36):
to signal, you know, do their green signaling. They're rising
reli reliability issues and there's a seemingly endless series of
really bad decisions which if you and I've not read
the book, I've simply read a summary of the book

(26:59):
called short the Grid. Now, Trump is obviously having an
impact on this, but in reality, the offshore wind business
in this country suffers from array of sustainability issues that
long pre date Trump two point zero, and all the
tiresome blame shifting kind of needs to stop. And the

(27:22):
blame shifting isn't just the companies themselves, but it's also
the cabal. I casually mentioned something about the when we
first started talking about ORSTED and that there were going
to be layoffs. What'd you do, dragon you looked up layoffs.

Speaker 4 (27:43):
I was just trying to find out headlines and get
some articles so I could post to Michael says go
here dot com about what you're talking about.

Speaker 2 (27:49):
And one of the.

Speaker 4 (27:50):
First articles that popped up about this wind project. Is
that CNN has one that reads canceled wind project puts
thousands of jobs risk.

Speaker 3 (28:00):
Canceled wind project and the lead is thousands of jobs
are lost. Okay, well that's true, So what's your point?

Speaker 4 (28:12):
Well, I was. I was also just kind of curious
because it's it's CNN. I started to dive in the past.
This is what other major construction projects energy construction projects
might might have been put on hold or canceled in
the past four or five years. Oh wait, there was
the Keystone Excel pipeline. Yeah, yeah, so curious as to

(28:35):
what CNN had to say about.

Speaker 2 (28:36):
That these there were thousands of jobs lost.

Speaker 4 (28:38):
There of course, yeah, I mean obviously if you're going
to cancel those so so so the headlines that I
found from CNN for that one are developer polls, the
plug on Keystone Excel oil pipeline.

Speaker 3 (28:49):
So developer polls, my plug, nothing to do with government
policy or.

Speaker 4 (28:54):
Not not on headline. No, But and I did it
was like, okay, how many jobs? They to say? How
many jobs? So I did control f in the article
and the word jobs doesn't show up in the article,
so okay, so there must be another one out there.
Let's say I got to keep searching. I gotta find
it because CNN, the're cable news network. I mean, they're

(29:15):
pretty big. You think they would want to follow them.
So I didn't find this other one. Biden administration to
resend Keystone pipeline permit on Wednesday. Okay, So any any
jobs or workers on that one? So control f on
that No, No, no jobs, no mention of workers losing
their jobs. No, nothing along tho kindliness in that article either.

(29:38):
But this wind turbine one No, no, No. Headline reads
thousands of jobs at risk.

Speaker 2 (29:45):
So and of course that's all Trump's fault. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (29:47):
One, but despite the fact that the projects are not
sustainable on their own financially, it's Trump's fault and Trump's
killing those jobs.

Speaker 6 (29:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (29:56):
One is dangerous for jobs, and one nobody cares.

Speaker 6 (29:59):
Thanks with the clarity, I hope your listener knows that
Jesus still lives him even when he changes the station.
Jesus loves all of us. Jesus actually brought us, Michael Brown.

Speaker 3 (30:17):
That's nice to know, because I think a lot of
people think that the devil that Satan brought me to you.
Many people think that I am Satan. Right, Dragon just
ask New Orleans, just to ask Hulu and Netflix. Netflix
didn't do so bad. No, the reason I think we're
talking about documentaries about Hurricane Katrina. I think the reason

(30:40):
Netflix wasn't nearly as bad as what Hulu was. Spike
Lee was the executive producer on the first two episodes
and the the producer on the third.

Speaker 4 (30:51):
Episode director on the third one too. Yeah, I was
the director on the third thing.

Speaker 3 (30:55):
So that makes perfect sense then, because that was Spike Lee,
and Spike Lee was one the first ones to recognize that.
Wait a minute, there's just this. There's there's something not
quite right about Lammon Brown. For everything that went on
twenty years ago, we're talking about these two documentaries. Hulu
did one which Dragon came in one day and said,

(31:17):
get ready for the hate, and missus Redbeard was shocked.
Would that be a fair term?

Speaker 4 (31:24):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (31:25):
Use, yeah, shocked, not not about me, but about how
biased it was. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (31:34):
Well, after twenty years you just learned that it is
what it did.