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Offshore wind facilities are enormously expensive and environmentally destructive. The primary purported justification for constructing them is to reduce “carbon” (carbon dioxide or CO₂) emissions and save the planet from “catastrophic climate change.” However, this justification is not just built on a false premise, but adding offshore wind to a state’s energy mix will most likely also increase global CO₂ emissions. That means the net emission benefits are hugely negative, as are other net environmental and economic effects.

This study finds that carbon dioxide reductions from local (state and national, as opposed to global) wind power generation are greatly overstated. For starters, any CO₂ decrease will be small at best, largely because the intermittency of necessary wind speeds forces backup gas- fired power emissions to increase when the wind isn’t blowing. (Sufficient backup electricity from battery modules is also hugely expensive, heavily reliant on raw materials that are in short supply, and likely a decade or more away.)

The net result is that adding offshore wind to the existing coal, gas, and nuclear and/or hydroelectric power system, though modestly lowering emissions at first glance, does little to reduce local power emissions overall because of the gas (or coal) backup generation now needed to maintain a stable grid.

But the story gets worse.

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