Editor’s note: “In recent years, the Southeast Asian country of Vietnam experienced a boom in renewable energy investments driven by generous feed-in tariffs, under which the state committed to buying electricity for 20 years at above-market prices. However, the high tariffs increased losses for Vietnam’s state-owned power utility EVN, the only buyer of the generated electricity, and led to an increase in power prices for households and factories. Authorities have repeatedly tried to reduce the high tariffs. Now they are considering a retroactive review of the criteria set for accessing the feed-in tariffs.”
“It’s really hard to build wind farms in Arizona, and if you put this into place, it’s just pretty much wiping you out,” said Troy Rule, a professor of law at Arizona State University and a published expert on renewable energy systems. “It’s like you’re trying to kill Arizona’s wind farm industry.”
United States Congressional House Republicans are seeking to prevent the use of taxpayer dollars to incentivize what they describe as “green energy boondoggles” on agricultural lands, citing subsidies that could cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade.
They are expensive to build, just finding their footing on this side of the Atlantic, and have faced backlash from parties as varied as beachfront property owners and fishermen to coastal businesses and fossil fuel backers(most of the developers have fossil fuel ties).
The future of Humboldt County’s offshore wind industry appears increasingly uncertain following mass layoffs at RWE and Vineyard Offshore, the multinational energy companies leading efforts to develop commercial-scale floating wind farms on the North Coast. The job cuts come in response to widespread market uncertainty following President Donald Trump’s efforts to ban offshore wind development in the United States.
A critical permit for an offshore wind farm planned near the New Jersey Shore has been invalidated by an administrative appeals board.
By Malaka Rodrigo / Mongabay
COLOMBO — In a dramatic turn of events, Indian tycoon Gautam Adani’s Green Energy Limited (AGEL) has withdrawn from the second phase of a proposed wind power project in northern Sri Lanka. The project, which was planned to generate 250 MW through the installation of 52 wind turbines in Mannar in the island’s north, faced strong opposition since the beginning due to serious environmental implications and allegations of financial irregularities.
While renewable energy is a crucial need in the era of climate change, Sri Lankan environmentalists opposed the project, citing potential ecological damage to the sensitive Mannar region. Additionally, concerns arose over the way the contract was awarded, without a competitive bidding process.
The former government, led by President Ranil Wickremesinghe, had inked an agreement with AGEL, setting the power purchase price at $0.82 per unit for 20 years. This rate was significantly higher than rates typically offered by local companies. “This is an increase of about 70%, a scandalous deal that should be investigated,” said Rohan Pethiyagoda, a globally recognized taxonomist and former deputy chair of the IUCN’s Species Survival Commission.
Legal battles
Five lawsuits were filed against this project by local environmental organizations, including the Wildlife and Nature Protection Society, the Centre for Environmental Justice and the Environmental Foundation Ltd. In January, the newly elected government expressed its desire to cancel the initial agreement and to renegotiate its terms and conditions, citing the high electricity tariff. Environmentalists welcomed the decision, believing the project would be scrapped entirely. However, their relief was short-lived when AGEL clarified that the project itself was not canceled, only the tariff agreement.
Government spokesperson Nalinda Jayatissa later confirmed that the project would proceed after renegotiating a lower power purchase rate. However, two weeks later, AGEL announced its complete withdrawal from the project, a decision widely believed to be influenced by the government’s stance.
Wind energy potential
Sri Lanka has been exploring wind energy potential for more than two decades, with the first large-scale wind farm in Mannar named Thambapavani commissioned in 2020. This facility, comprising 30 wind turbines, currently generates 100 MW of power. With an additional 20 turbines planned, the Mannar wind sector would have surpassed 100 towers.
The Adani Group had pledged an investment totaling $442 million, and already, $5 million has been spent in predevelopment activities. On Feb. 15, the Adani Group formally announced its decision to leave the project. In a statement, the group stated: “We would respectfully withdraw from the said project. As we bow out, we wish to reaffirm that we would always be available for the Sri Lankan government to have us undertake any development opportunity.”
Environmentalists argue that Mannar, a fragile peninsula connected to the mainland by a narrow land strip, cannot sustain such extensive development. “If built, this project would exceed the carrying capacity of the island,” Pethiyagoda noted.
Mannar is not only a growing tourism hub, known for its pristine beaches and archaeological sites, but also Sri Lanka’s most important bird migration corridor. As the last landmass along the Central Asian Flyway, the region hosts millions of migratory birds, including 20 globally threatened species, he added.
Sampath Seneviratne of the University of Colombo, who has conducted satellite tracking research on migratory birds, highlighted the global importance of Mannar. “Some birds that winter here have home ranges as far as the Arctic Circle,” he said. His research has shown how extensively these birds rely on the Mannar Peninsula.
Although mitigation measures such as bird monitoring radar have been proposed to reduce turbine collisions, power lines distributing electricity remain a significant threat, particularly to species like flamingos, a major attraction in Mannar. The power lines distributing electricity from the already established wind farm near the Vankalai Ramsar Wetland and are already proven to be a death trap for unsuspecting feathered kind.
Nature-based tourism
Given Mannar’s ecological significance, conservationists say the region has greater potential as a destination for ecotourism rather than large-scale industrial projects. “Mannar’s rich biodiversity and historical value make it ideal for nature-friendly tourism, which would also benefit the local community,” Pethiyagoda added.
With AGEL’s withdrawal, Sri Lanka now faces the challenge of balancing its renewable energy ambitions with environmental conservation. However, there are other sites in Sri Lanka having more wind power potential, and Sri Lankan environmentalists hope ecologically rich Mannar will be spared from unsustainable wind farms projects.
Photo by Dattatreya Patra on Unsplash
More and more environmental damage is being done by misguided efforts to forestall the mythical ”Global Warming Monster”. The captive environmental movement fell for that hoax and the predictable result will be a proliferation of ecological destruction caused by doomed attempts to head off a catastrophe that is not going to happen. Now, when it is probably too late with huge fortunes already invested in so-called ”clean” energy projects, the environmental movement is finally starting to wake up and realize they need to oppose those too.
So the message must be shouted loud and clear: Greenhouse gases, particularly CO2, are not a big problem. The irrational moral panic over harmless emissions like CO2 is a much bigger threat than any amount of carebon emissions could be. The world has been sold on the false story that some substitute for fossil fuels is needed. That story must be demolished as soon as possible. Whatever harm fossil fuels may do, the alternatives are worse.
And, yes, Jeff, it would be nice if the population was reduced to what the earth could support and if those few would live as hunbter-gatherers, but until that happens, the demand for some sort of industrial energy is not going away. Nobody is going to give up modern lifestyles regardless of what some few ascetics preach at them. So a monastic lifestyle is not on the cards. The choices are continue with a mix of energy sources, predominently coal and oil, or switch to the ”alternatives” that are worse.
Banning phony “green” energy projects is a good thing and should be applauded. Let’s not think that someone like Trump is banning offshore wind projects for environmental reasons, but the result is still a good one for the natural environment. Next we need to ban fossil fuel extraction & use!
Oil drilling and strip mining coal are very destructive to the environment. But if they were banned, something would have to replace them and that would be something worse. Wind power, solar power, hydro power, tidal power, and worst of all, nuclear power, are the only alternatives on tap. Which do you propose?
Given that the ”CO2 causes global warming” myth is not true, it looks like coal and oil are the least damaging energy sources available. And the ”greenhouse gases” scare looks to me like a PR campaign by the nuclear industry.
1. Water vapor is around 100 times as efficient as a greenhouse gas as CO2 is, and there is at least 100 times as much of it in the atmoasphere, so the net greenhouse effect from water vapor is at least 10,000 times as great as that of CO2. And since the normal variation in the amount of water vapor is more than 15% from any one year to another, any contribution from CO2 would be lost in the background and undetectable.
2. Plants take up CO2 and in sealed greenhouses, with extra CO2 pumped in, they grow bigger and faster. If there were actually more CO2 in the air today than there was 50 years ago, any old farmer or gardener would tell you his plants are growing bigger now than they did 50 years ago. Since there has been no noticeable increase in plant growth, there has been no increase in CO2, no matter what the scientists may claim their instruments measure.
3. Moose in New England are moving south. In colonial times, they were found as far south as central New Jersey, but starting in the 1840s, at the end of the Little Ice Age, when the climate became warmer than it had been for the last 400 years, they moved north and when I was growing up in New England, they were found only in Maine and the far north of Vermont and New Hampshire. Now, for the last 30 years, they have been moving south and are now permanent residents in Mass. and have been seen as far south as New Jersey.
The reason is that there is a small fly that gets into their ears and drives them crazy. They stay to the north of its’ range. When the climate warmed up in the 1840s, the fly expanded north and the moose moved north to stay away from it. So if the moose are moving south again, that fly is contracting its’ range southward, and they are now again able to follow it south.
So the climate, at least during the part of the year in which these flies breed, is getting COLDER, not warmer. And I simply do not care how many scientists say otherwise or what their reasons for saying it might be. They are wrong. And if all the so-called “scientists” on earth say one thing and the moose tell me the opposite, I will trust the moose, not modern science.
The whole issue of climate destabilization has been so politicized that nothing reported in the scientific journals can be trusted. And there is no scientific consensus, no matter what the claims are to the contrary. But even if there was a consensus, science is not a democracy and the question of who is right cannot ever be settled by a vote. It can only be settled by citing the EVDENCE, not by citing the numbers of scientists who believe it. It is entirely possible for 100% of all scientists to be dead wrong on some issue. That has happened many times.
Any scientist who thinks the climate is gettting warmer is simply going according to a theory and ignoring the evidence. The greenhouse gases theory is wrong, but it happens to be the only theory they know of, so they go with it in spite of evidence to the contrary.
Most climate scientists today do not even look at any evidence outside their offices. What they look at are computer print-outs. They do almost all their work with computer models, not observations of the natural world outside their windows. And a computer model is only as good as the assumptions they put into it.
They see changes happening in climate. That is true. And they see that the changes match the growth in numbers and industrial activity of humans. That is also true. And they see the match in time as evidence that there is a cause and effect relationship between climate changes and human activities. That is also true.
But then they make a typical mistake that is very common in science. They do not know any way to explain how human actions could be causing the climate changes except the greenhouse gases theory, so they conclude that it must be greenhouses gases that are causing the climate changes.
The climate is changing. But it is not getting warmer. It is also not getting colder. What it is doing is getting warmer and colder. It is getting wetter and drier. In short, it is getting more random. It is getting more variable. It is getting more chaotic and fluctuating more widely. It is going to extremes. It is pulsating more rapidly and with greater amplitude.
On a statistical graph, this will look as if things are normal because a very hot summer and a very cold winter average out to a normal year. A very warm winter and a cool summer will also average out to a normal year. So to a scientist, with the usual mechanistic fixation on numbers, there will have been a normal year, while to any living organism, there will have been two disasters instead of one.
Most of of what is being attributed to global warming and blamed on greenhouse effect from extra CO2 in the air is really due to the use of radioactivity, both civilian and military. The rest is from electrical technology and bad land use practices like deforestation. If there is a component from industral pollution, it is a very small one, probably less than that from forest fires.
The direct biological effects of radioactivity have been intensively studied, and are well-known, even if not as well understood. But the meteorological effects have not been studied by anyone except one physicist I spoke to once in Lithuania, whose work has not been published in English, and he told me he has not been able to get funding to do more research on the subject since 1988.
There is an hysterical world-wide politicized movement of unscientific global warming pushers promoting the false claim that a greenhouse effect from combustion-produced gases is causing climate changes. And that is resulting in more destruction in attempts to prevent a problem that does not exist.