Sam Kanner

Could we have an entire decade instead? Cool, thanks earther.gizmodo.com/floating-wind-…

Let me get this straight. The federal government held a legal auction for the right to build offshore wind farms. A company won those auctions fair and square, paying nearly a billion dollars into the U.S. Treasury. The projects went through years of review. Courts repeatedly upheld their legality. Everything was above board. Then the Trump administration tried five separate times to kill other wind projects in federal court and lost every single time. Judges reviewed the administration’s supposed “national security” justification and weren’t persuaded.  So now they’ve landed on a new plan: pay the company nearly ONE BILLION DOLLARS of your tax money to just walk away. Because, and I am not making this up, the president thinks offshore wind turbines are ugly and claims without evidence that they “drive whales crazy.”  He’s been nursing this petty grudge since 2012, when he tried to block a wind farm visible from his golf course in Scotland. Fourteen years later, American taxpayers are footing the bill for it. This is stupid policy. It’s fiscally reckless, strategically blind, and driven entirely by a personal vendetta rather than any coherent vision for American energy or competitiveness. Meanwhile, China is racing ahead, building offshore wind at a staggering pace and positioning itself to dominate the global clean energy economy for decades to come. None of this is America First. nytimes.com/2026/03/17/cli…

@ramez Cool. And also automated panel manufacturing is the norm in most advanced yards. Don’t even get me started on the large diameter stuff.

The US desperately needs to fix its moribund ship building industry. At a minimum for defense reasons. I'm excited to see people trying.

@ramez @Jordan_W_Taylor @cremieuxrecueil Would love to see The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly for all of our energy sources. I have quite a few bullet points in mind for solar, nuclear, CCGTs, geothermal

@Jordan_W_Taylor @cremieuxrecueil :) Was responding to @cremieuxrecueil on the Trump point! Love your feed, btw.

A German energy trader provided me with his current evaluation of wind energy, and I suspect the details might give away why the Trump administration seems so opposed to wind. What follows are his remarks --- The good: - Easy to launch serially and build competencies - LCOE are probably lowest of any technology beyond 35-40ish degree lattitude if you cannot use hydro instead - Very low emission - Beyond 60ish degrees lattitude solar becomes unfeasible but wind usually even more useful The bad: - Generation is a fully stochastic diffusion process, it's not deterministic unlike solar which comes and goes at predictable intervals - Decay half life is too long for short-term storage (batteries, most pumped hydro) - Decentralization without robustness (decentralized vulnerability to [necessary] steering input, depending on geographical circumstances very fragmented grid topology may ensue - Very low power density, amassing too much wind power in a small area considerably lowers total harvest (see North Sea) - Very high intensity in rare earth minerals - Forecasting of odd phenomenons affecting short-term power production (icing, cut-out triggered by gusts) quite challenging The ugly: - Rather mediocre synergy with nuclear (unlike PV) - High transport requirements due to typical lifetime as well as concrete density; in most cases the concrete needs to remain in the ground - Goals of extracting energy from wind efficiently are at odds with extracting useful energy efficiently (i.e. use turbines that attempt to provide lower costs of load coverage as compared to just maximize production) Using some, even quite a lot of wind power, depending on your entity's (usually country's I guess) requirements can make sense Do I think it ever makes sense to go close to 100% volatile renewables? Rarely. Opportunity costs for flexibility are too large (which include the reduction in full utilization hours of high-capex production assets (Data Centers, manufacturing machinery, etc.) by having typically too expensive load coverage costs to just run them baseload-y in general) --- The volatility plausibly makes the AI revolution much more difficult to finance, hence disdain for wind as an energy source.

@ramez I’m so curious where my inference requests go. I’ve tried asking ChatGPT but it won’t divulge! Reno? It definitely feels like it’s going to Virginia and back..

I would pay more for an LLM subscription that gave me lower latency with reasoning models, and nothing else. Waiting is interminable.

@ericschmidt 🙋‍♂️we’re working on something similar. Just on Earth.

Yes.

@nickvanosdol Agree with 1,3 and 4, but shouldn’t solar suffer from these ills as well?. The onshore turbines, comprising the bulk of wind deployment, have been around for decades and have low O&M. The GE1.5 is a workhorse. Would also throw nimbyism into #4 as well.

@samkanner off the cuff id guess interest rates interconnection queues and higher than expected maintenance costs & turbine issues plus a lot of attractive site saturation in some markets maybe

Wind energy deployment in the U.S. was already such a dog vs. solar the last few years. Hard to imagine what happens now. Especially offshore, that's gotta be quite literally dead in the water.

@nickvanosdol Why is that you think?

@samkanner I have zero beef with wind & try to evaluate every gen tech on merits & demerits. The thing with wind in the U.S. is unfortunately very little is being built, relatively speaking at least

@FracSlap Guess which form of energy is cheaper than any of the ones you listed? (LCOE, not CAPEX)

The future of energy is solar + nat gas +batteries I don't know why any of you try fighting the inevitable.

@duncancampbell @stripe @ScaleMicrogrids @paces_ai Isn’t onshore wind cheaper than solar per kWh, not per kW?

Psyched to share something @stripe, @ScaleMicrogrids, and @paces_ai have been cooking for the past few months. A massive wave of new energy demand has been unleashed by AI. How will we power it? We think gigantic off-grid solar microgrids offer a very compelling solution.

@JGrybowski Jobs jobs jobs

@JesseJenkins @Eavor @fervoenergy Additionally/alternatively: many of those countries have huge (deep water) offshore wind potential

Alternatively/additionally: really key potential opportunity for advanced geothermal, including enhanced geothermal and closed-loop. LFG @Eavor and @fervoenergy!

Folks. We're going to need nuclear power (fission or even fusion) to decarbonize the global economy. Nations like US, Canada, Australia, China etc blessed with land can drive to net-zero with renewables only IF they so choose. But a Net-zero India? South Korea? Japan? Indonesia?

@ACORE @BOEM Come visit our tests later this year. The Aikido One will be the largest floating wind platform built in the US!

America's 1st floating #OffshoreWind turbines are coming to the Gulf of Maine at a @BOEM-approved lease area. 🙌 ACORE's Ray Long emphasized how this demonstrates "progress being made to responsibly harness America's abundant offshore wind resources." canarymedia.com/articles/wind/…

@drvolts @offshorewindca Link to the pod?

Just recorded an absolutely fascinating pod on the progress of offshore wind in California. It's all deep ocean off the coast there, so it'll have to be floating turbines, not fixed. LOTS of stuff will have to come together just right, but ... it's under way. Exciting!

@thegarrettscott @WizLikeWizard Nacelles, too

Imho, the three coolest places to see your logo is on hardware, construction docs, and purchase contracts.

@ayanaeliza @oceanpanel Love this image! Where is it from?

@JesseJenkins Could be a great place to assemble floating platforms too!

Construction giant Skanska will turn the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal into one of the US’s largest offshore wind ports. The $861M facility will serve as staging ground, O&M hub & interconnection point for the 2.1 GW Empire Wind project and others electrek.co/2024/04/26/ska…

@reNEWS_ We need a new picture!! This is too old

US energy contractor Morrison has been awarded a contract by Aikido Technologies to work on the Aikido One floating wind project renews.biz/92570/

@ramez Not so sure about the towers. Would require a new facility (yes could be new spiral welding techniques) per farm. Capex for a new facility on the order of 300M, would ruin economics, right?. Otherwise you are seam welding (and coating!) the two halves of the tower on site?

@samkanner The nacelles are definitely a problem. Towers less so (i think) given the various new tower technologies in the pipe.

Wind power is limited, in part, by the size of blades you can move to a site. Radia, un-stealthing today with $100m in funding, is solving that by building the world's largest plane: (Disclosure: I'm an advisor and former exec there.) wsj.com/business/energ…