Offshore wind power is a dead end for Europe.

- It isn’t even competitive in the North Sea, with depths of just 15-30 meters and wind speeds of 10m/second.

- Some predictions had the levelized cost per MWh of offshore wind down to $40 by 2030, decreasing much like solar has. In fact it costs over $110 per megawatt-hour, and the price is *rising*.

- Costs won’t fall like solar’s have. The turbine is only 24 percent of the lifetime cost, and much of that goes to raw materials. The rest goes on support infrastructure (transmission cables, etc) and maintenance. These costs don’t factor in the cost to the grid of new connections or of having backup supply for when wind output drops.

- The industry is in free fall. Ørsted, the world’s largest developer of offshore wind, has dropped by 88% over the last five years. Vestas, which makes turbines, has dropped by 36%.

- Even if costs DID fall, the way we pay for wind projects locks in today’s prices for up to 20 years.

- Despite all this, the British and Dutch govts are buying *more* offshore wind power. The new Dutch govt plans to add 40 gigawatts of wind power to the 63 GW of electricity generation it has already.

Great new piece by Pieter Garicano.