Federal judge lifts administration halt of offshore wind farm in New England

I have a pet theory that the secret to getting energy projects online is faster deployment methods. Make all the turbines/reactors/whatever in a factory so that all you have to do on-site is plop them out and plug them in.

MONDAY: The lower court has denied the NIMBY injunction against installing any more wind turbines.

MONDAY NIGHT: Thousands of wind turbines are hurled off the back of a container ship with a catapult and automatically drop anchor and start generating power.

TUESDAY: The appellate court has reinstated the NIMBY injunction against installing any more wind turbines.

..but they're already all installed.

Energy projects are just a variation of a real estate project. As you might know, a lot of the difficulty in mass producing buildings isn’t making the parts but preparing the site to receive the parts. There’s probably 5 or 10 companies in your vicinity that can ship you prefabricated walls and floors for a house. But you still have to have the plans engineered for the exact piece of land you plan to put it on. The same will be true for every windmill and solar farm. Studying the site and planning the build are unique to each building and limit how fast you can go anyway.

Sounds like a racket.

>But you still have to have the plans engineered for the exact piece of land you plan to put it on.

>The same will be true for every windmill and solar farm.

No, you don't. That's purely a figment of how successful the civil engineering lobby was at regulatory-capturing their way into the process.

The people who build buildings and windmills know what kind of foundations they need. If you have even a ballpark estimate of your site conditions they will happily tell you approximately what you'll need to do.

An extra inch of concrete here or there or a foot less of pile spacing or an extra few passed with the dozer costs basically nothing. The only reason you see people designing things to the bare minimum is that when you're being forced to pay a engineer to punch in numbers either way it makes sense to take advantage of that and make them tell you what the bare minimum is so you can at least save a bit on actual construction costs.

You think you hate crony capitalism or the micromanaging nanny state or whatever you want to call it now. Just wait until you engage in any kind of project that doesn't benefit from all the exemptions that residential does.

Racket that's spread out over enough people and processes that any one point of it is defensible with a mild enough amount of "lying, but with plausible deniability" that the common man can be hoodwinked.

The best kind of racket really.

And this is why partisanship is such an own-goal. Partisan Democrats want wind turbines instead of coal, but to get them they'd have to admit that the thing standing in their way is these excessive rules impeding the construction of anything, which is contrary to the precept that regulations are good and getting rid of regulations is bad.

Whereas if you put aside the dogma you might notice that giving the other team what they want in this case and getting rid of some regulations would actually be good and allow you to do the thing you want to do.