If these projects ultimately end up canceled they’ll be the largest “mostly done” infrastructure projects to be cancelled. A huge waste. And a monument to US incompetency.
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Even bigger than the abandoned AP1000 reactors in South Carolina? That was about $5B of abandoned capital, IIRC. It was also a monument to IS incompetency, but at least those responsible went to prison for it. I doubt we would see the same for cancelling the wind projects.
Just as a side note: Recently it seems as if there is interest in finishing those projects as a result of data center energy needs. Your point still stands but just wanted to put that out there.
There's been talk for a long time about restarting construction on Virgil C Summer again, but it has never happened. I remember an interview with a Santee Cooper exec that was extremely withering on the prospects of it actually happening. I can't find it now, but here's a 2019 video from the then-new CEO about the people who were looking into restarting construction, that's far less withering:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tq0LsX_fCm4
I'll believe it when it happens. Traditional 1GW nuclear like the AP1000 is just such a huge financial bite to make these days that the only orgs big enough to do it are large consortiums of large companies, or nation state.
It's a tough position because the AP1000 has a much better chance of reaching affordability than SMRs, but nobody wants to spend the $50B-$100B in capital to produce uneconomic nuclear reactors in order to maybe drive down the cost of construction so that future reactors will be economic.
It's a very different situation for funding than solar, because there's small scale use cases where expensive energy makes sense, in places that wires don't reach, etc. etc., on devices, etc., and that's what really drove a lot of the early development of solar manufacturing capacity. That got it to the point that Germany could do subsidies to really scale up the deployment of expensive energy, and since Germany spent that money, it's been smooth sailing for the rest of the world.
The path for nuclear is not as clear as it was for solar.
> incompetency
"corruption"
spite of one man child
Almost half of the voting public intentionaly acted to sabotage the country. Let's stop treating them with kid gloves, they are anti-American and should never be forgiven.
This is not how to reverse the damage that has already been done, if you are unwilling to forgive, you are as bad as MAGA, perhaps worse. Forgiveness is a core human virtue we do not want to lose.
No, half of the voters did not intentionally vote for this. Half of the voting public doesn't pay any attention and votes based on their finances or party allegiance.
You and I saw all the bad things to know what would happen. That was hidden from many people. Yes you can fault them for being ignorant, but that doesn't imply intentional malice
There is no forgiveness without contrition. However you want to spin it, they did vote for this and as long as they don't acknowledge culpability for their actions there is no point in forgiving them -- they'll just continue blamelessly voting to sabotage the country.
Forgiveness is warranted when people express genuine remorse and strive to not repeat the same action again.
Anyone who voted for Trump in 2024 had his first term as a shining example of what the man is. This goes doubly for people who voted for him twice.
The sad truth is that it's millions of people. These people just want to see the world burn due to nothing but narcissism and hate of the imaginary "other side".
There are a lot of people on "both sides" who choose their positions on the issues to fit their political party as opposed to choose the party that fits their positions. Particularly for an issue like offshore wind or Keystone XL that is basically "out of sight and out of mind" there are millions of people who would change their position if the right people told them to.
There are not in fact millions of people who want to burn the world just to spite others. If you truly believe that then you have really failed to understand people around you, and should try to better empathize. As a rule, people do what they do because they believe it to be the right thing. They might be misguided in that belief, of course, but the idea of millions of people deciding on a cartoonishly evil course of action is not an accurate analysis of anything.
Are you talking about Biden?
The Keystone XL pipeline had been partially constructed before President Biden revoked the permit on January 20, 2021 on his first day in office. About 300 miles had been completed when TC Energy officially abandoned the project.
Yep just one man opposing cheap home grown energy: Trump.
And Putin. Two men, Trump, Putin and Farage.
Three men, Trump, Putin, Farage, and every far-right party in europe.
Among the people who are clearly involved in this conspiracy to deprive humanity of cheaper energy are...
The child may be mad but he is happy to take bribes from the oil industry so they are as guilty as he is. And the same goes for most right wing politicians in Europe.
Humanity needs to wake up to the fact that our supposed "leaders" only lead us toward servitude. Our economic and political systems are designed to keep the vast majority of people in either literal or figurative chains so 25 people can get rich.
The entire system needs to be smashed to bits for the good of the many. Because after all, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of a few, or the one. But not in current human societies -- currently we value cruelty and malice.
We're all guilty of this.
> A huge waste. And a monument to US incompetency
But a windfall for the litigation financier that buys those claims off the U.S. government.
These leases are contracts. Sovereign immunity is curtailed when the U.S. contracts.
Worse than the Superconducting Supercollider?
Yes far worse, the superconducting supercollider produced science which has debatable value. There’s an argument we lost nothing by canceling the project.
Wind farms produce electricity which pays for the investment when you finish but pays nothing when a stop early. This makes stopping early extremely economically harmful.
Esoteric programming language developed for the superconducting super collider, Glish, was picked up by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, which used it well into the 2000s.
Glish supported networked remote procedure calls, made then almost transparent to the program. Otherwise, Glish was roughly similar to Tcl or Lua.
I don't know what other bits and pieces got salvaged from the SSC project.
Documentation etc: https://www.cv.nrao.edu/glish/papers/index.html
I've read a lot of the science funded in the early engineering of the project around the magnets eventually rolled into the LHC, so there's that.
Otherwise it seems like we spent a lot of money on a 17-mile hole in the ground in North Texas.
The effective electricity rate in MA is already $0.37/kWh. How much further could it go?
That’s a joke right?
I see no reason why it couldn't rise to the equivalent of $37/mWs under the looming hyperinflation.
Cries in PG&E
Or that space telescope?
GOP cronyism and deep corruption.
> US incompetency
US corruption.
Incompetence would've been a good news here.
Well, judicial checks and balances should protect them until regime change, which is coming.
I dunno. The Americans stuck their hand in a blender for four years and then four years later needed to try it again. Alas, Stumpy McNubs remains long on limbs but short on memory.
I have similar concerns, but the evidence so far is encouraging.
https://old.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1puwkpj/democrats...
https://old.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1qu6vyu/trump_cal...
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5716988-democrats-scor...
https://www.npr.org/2026/02/01/nx-s1-5695678/democrat-taylor...
"The President's party loses seats in the midterms" is a long-term trend and it seems pretty likely to hold this time.
The real question is, once the Democrats are back in control of at least one house of Congress, are they going to be sane or are they going to spend two years making such fools of themselves that we end up with another Republican President in 2028?
Don't look into laser with remaining eye! (Unless it's really shiny, and red?)
Science demands rigour and repeatability.
The first time many of Trump's desires to do illegal things were somewhat restrained by non-political government employees who remembered that their oath is to the Constitution, not the President.
Based on what I've read a lot of people who voted for him subsequent times thought that would continue.
It's going to be dicey whether you can keep all the suppliers engaged with start / stops over 3 years.
From the piece:
> Several of these projects are near completion and are likely to be done before any government appeal can be heard.
Just gotta keep grinding towards success.
This will kill most future investment in offshore wind even if those projects are sucessful.
There's no regime change coming when those in power run the elections, have already cheated in the past, and know that they are now untouchable.
It is not too useful to make bold unsupported claims that the current administration has the power to subvert elections. That just lowers us to their level, and the last thing we need is for a further erosion in confidence in our democratic system. The states run elections, and no matter what Trump says to get people to keep paying attention to him, they don't jump when the president tells them to. The feds have money and nukes, but States have a lot of the actual power.
Half the states are actively engaging in voter suppression, and the ones that aren't are under attack on all fronts by the federal government.
Elon Musk just announced spending 300 million to make it harder to vote.
And it didn't even make the headline of the article I read it in.
And he's being spreading lies about elections for years. Again, not regularly mentioned even in critical articles about him, because it's so normalized.
States run the elections.
The US president just today said that Republicans should "nationalize the voting" in future elections.
have you met the california high speed rail or not yet?
Well, that's not 'mostly done'