Exclusive: Richard Blakley explains multiple complications involving recently approved project
By The Biden administration has approved “the largest wind energy project in the world” spanning 25 miles off Virginia Beach’s coast “consist[ing] of 176 wind turbines with towers taller than the Washington Monument and turbine blades longer than a football field.” The Dominion-built wind farm is planned to be “more than 20 miles off the coast from the hotels and touristy boardwalk of Virginia Beach” powering 660,000 homes. Construction starts May 1, 2024, with plans “to be completed by late 2026.”
Being praised by the “left-of-center” Southern Environmental Law Center, reveals something must be wrong with this project, even it is seemingly environmentally minded.
The first problem is all the dead whales. Wind turbines noisily reverberate under water, creating marine-life problems. Already whales are beaching themselves near wind farms, with 30 whales dying between December 2022 and March of 2023. Marine life uses sound to navigate, and “whales are extremely sensitive to noise.” With about 350 remaining of the endangered North Atlantic Right Whale, “only 70 females [are] capable of producing newborn.” Getting caught in the middle of a maze of numerous operating wind turbines totally disorients and exhausts whales and other affected marine life.
Secondly, wind turbine noise also causes problems for commercial fishing industries, which faces decimation, putting thousands of people out of work. An Associated Press report states that wind turbines alter marine environments by noise, vibration, electromagnetic fields and heat transfer. The federal agency NOAA Fisheries points out that wind turbines could displace fishermen from traditional fishing areas, change the distribution, abundance and regional fish species composition, cause economic losses, increase vessel traffic, disrupt vessel radar systems, damage or destroy fishing gear, and reduce safety at sea causing navigational challenges.
A Dominion spokesperson stated, “The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) has done an extraordinarily thorough environmental review of the project and carefully considered potential impacts to marine wildlife and the environment.” If this is true, why did the Obama and Biden administrations issue waivers exempting wind companies from the Endangered Species Act in case endangered animals and birds are impacted?
The third problem is bird chopping. “A wind turbine’s blades are very large and rotate at very high speeds. Unfortunately, their blades can harm and kill species that fly into them, like birds and bats.” Paul Kamenar, counsel for the National Legal and Policy Center, stated, “Windmills have an environmental impact, not only on whales but on birds that get chopped up by the windmills.”
Dead birds, in turn, will create shark feeding zones around the turbines.
With blades spinning at 200 mph, experts state, the lungs of bats explode midair from the pressure vortex produced.
A fourth problem is the fact turbine blades must be replaced every 15 years. The offshore Virginia wind farm will have 176 turbines, times 3 blades each, which equals 528 blades. Where do you suppose they are going to dump 528 blades every 15 years when they are sitting more than 20 miles out in the ocean? Landfills cannot take them. It’s doubtful Texas is going to take any more, for the state already has a 30-acre field piled high with no resolution of what to do with them. A good guess is that these spent blades will be dumped into the ocean. Eventually, they will wash ashore at the “hotels and touristy boardwalk of Virginia Beach.” Also, 528 football-field-length spent turbine blades washing into shipping lanes at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard (NNSY) at Portsmouth, Newport News and Norfolk is likely to cause navigational difficulties.
A fifth problem: Wind turbines impact our national defense. The Pentagon has stated that wind turbine farms will negatively impact our nation’s defensive radar systems, including the Air Route Surveillance Radars (ARSR). Above the wind farms, aircraft detection will be difficult because of signal degradation and false targets. Also, detection of missiles launched against the United States will be hampered. A Pentagon spokesperson said, “A short-range missile launched from a ship could not reach nuclear command-and-control facilities in the Midwestern United States, but might be able to attack a naval base or coastal city,” like NNSY.
The British RAF has complained of North Sea wind farm blades scrambling radar readings. Each blade gives a false reading, which means three false readings per turbine. During training exercises, pilots use “offshore turbines to hide from ‘enemy’ fighter jets.”
The sixth problem is the insanity of putting your country’s energy source more than 20 miles off the coast. What could be wrong with that? How about ease of sabotage? One strafing run of a military jet could easily take out 25 miles of wind turbines, crippling the country’s power system that no longer has oil, gas, or nuclear power to fall back upon, not to mention damage from bridge-hitting terrorist cargo ships, bouncing like bumper cars through wind farms.