Tell-tale time

Truth leaks in the transition narrative get too big to hide

“Time works in favour of the truth” someone on X said the other day in a context unrelated to energy. The statement struck me as a beautifully succinct one. It was also perfectly fitting to what has been happening in Transitionland lately. Spoiler: it has not been good.

Take this recent report, for instance. Japanese prosecutors arrested a former deputy foreign minister for taking a bribe from a wind power developer. The bribe, of $414,000, was offered in exchange for the official talking up wind power.

Which he did: He “advocated promotion of renewable energy and urged the government during parliamentary sessions in 2019 not to heavily regulate the waters off the coast of Aomori where the company, Japan Wind Development Co., was bidding for offshore wind power projects,” according to Kyodo News.

No big deal, one would say. Happens all the time with oil and gas companies. Sure, it’s not a big deal. Except now some people may start wondering if that was one single isolated case or it has happened more than once and in more than one place.

One cannot help but wonder as earlier this year, the Japanese government announced ambitious offshore wind power targets: 10 GW by 2030, from 136 MW right now.

The ambition is as lofty as the Biden administration’s 30 GW of offshore wind by 2030, from a paltry 41 MW now. Judging by what’s been happening in U.S. offshore wind lately, however, the targets may need to be revised. Sorry, I meant they will have to be revised. And Japan would do well to take note of the latest developments in the U.S.

Earlier this month, the U.S. federal government conducted its first-ever offshore wind power tender for the Gulf of Mexico. The tender attracted a grand total of one (1) successful bid, worth $5.6 million, from Germany’s RWE. The total number of bidders was two (2).

In its report on the news, Reuters suggested that the tender’s outcome reflected “meager demand for the clean energy source in a region known for oil and gas production.” As if oil and gas production is an infectious disease and wind turbines might get it if built in proximity to offshore platforms.

Yet the report also noted something obvious, too: of all four offshore tenders carried out by the Biden administration since the start of his term, this attracted the lowest interest.

Now, this could be because of the infectious oil and gas disease in the Gulf. It could, more reasonably, have something to do with weather patterns in the Gulf, as noted by the NYT, and the threat of hurricanes. Indeed, building offshore wind in a hurricane-prone area is quite an eccentric idea.

Also, the failure of the Gulf tender might have something to do with Orsted declaring impairments worth $2.3 billion from U.S. wind operations and Orsted clients complaining of too-low subsidies for offshore wind under the IRA.