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I looked into this a little because I was curious. I guess the ostensible "national security" rationale (which clearly is not the only reason!) for this is that
by tony_cannistra 10mo ago
I looked into this a little because I was curious. I guess the ostensible "national security" rationale (which clearly is not the only reason!) for this is that turbines severely degrade the utility of radar surveillance along the coastlines.
This is particularly relevant for low-altitude incursions and drones.
Now, other large governments (UK) have resolved this in several ways, including the deployment of additional radars on and within the turbine farms themselves.
So clearly this is politically motivated, and they're using what seems to be a real but solveable concern as a scapegoat.
- sigwinch 10mo agoI feel like the defense against drones is denser, sharper turbines.
- reactordev 10mo agoThis. Also, drones can be jammed pretty easily so making jamming stations on those platforms would be something too. The Brit’s have the right approach, just put radar on them so now you can see past them.
- tim333 10mo agoThe drones could fly over them. You could mount interceptor drones on them though. Like https://youtu.be/bsy5xzdKahU?t=80 https://youtu.be/bsy5xzdKahU?t=80
- beembeem 10mo agoResult first (kill anything not carbon-based), find rationale later. Same applies to how this admin forced layoffs at the green energy (hydro + nuclear) behemoth BPA [1] (which was funded entirely by ratepayers, not the federal government) then claimed an energy emergency to keep open coal plants serving the same geographies, coal plants that were already uneconomical and planned for shut down (or re-tooling to gas in the case of TransAlta's plant in WA). [2] Oh and they already re-hired some of the laid off staff at BPA because they overcut. There is no point in taking these arguments at face value. It's an excuse generated after-the-fact, and in service of one outcome - kill renewable energy. [1] https://www.columbian.com/news/2025/mar/12/letter-cuts-at-bpa-generate-questions/ https://www.columbian.com/news/2025/mar/12/letter-cuts-at-bp... [2] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/climate-lab/doe-orders-wa-coal-plant-to-continue-operating-despite-state-ban/ https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/climate-lab/doe-or...
- gregbot 10mo agoBPA is a federal agency. The Trump administration has been very supportive of zero carbon nuclear i believe they have promised $80 billion dollars to build new nuclear plants. Staff cuts dont mean they oppose using those energy sources.
- jetpks 10mo agoon the nuclear front, the administration has cut investment and reduced action in exchange for cheap promises. judge actions, not words.
- tehjoker 10mo agothis point is very important. trump will take all sides of an issue rhetorically so you can almost always find some quote of his supporting whatever position you favor but they have a very definite political program that is concentrating control, cutting federal workers, rolling back renewables, doing spectacular stunts to favor racists, and aggression overseas
- gregbot 10mo ago
- stefanfisk 10mo agoHere in Sweden a bunch of offshore wind farm project and even residential PV installations are blocked by the military for unspecified reasons that everyone assumes is that it blocks radar and other signal intelligence. Even though you can partially work around the issue with better onshore equipment or just placing the stuff on the other side of the interfering equipment it is still a step down from not having any interference in the first place. Especially if you want to keep your listening equipment secret.
- opello 10mo agoI'm surprised residential PV even interacts with radar -- or is that the other signal intelligence part?
- itishappy 10mo agoBig flat conductive panels make good reflectors.
- dzhiurgis 10mo agoWonder if it can be leveraged as for passive radar. Synthetic aperture also comes to mind. I’m clueless in this field tho.
- opello 10mo agoThat makes sense but my first thoughts were that panels wouldn't be oriented so that the majority of that flat surface was perpendicular to the radar but instead much closer to parallel, and that aviation radar would be higher up than a house roof to avoid ground clutter.
- hunterpayne 10mo agoIt probably has more to do with the fact that solar that far north is a non-starter. Any PV installed there will actually make AGW and carbon emissions worse, not better. Basically, the amount of carbon emitted due to manufacturing is greater than the carbon savings over the lifetime of the panel in those locations.
- rolph 10mo agoyes i found that take as well, i also found it interesting that potential for an industrial colony, and early warning infrastructure is undervalued.
- bakies 10mo agoSeems like "national security" has become a phrase that can be used to circumvent many laws, facts, and balance checks. Just like the word "terrorist." It seems like if these ever get challenged to the Supreme Court the current judges will rule with something like it being at the president's discretion. So obviously the government can spend some of that $1T military budget on fixing their coastal radar. I thought Massachusetts just won in court to get their money or construction resumed, wonder if this means they have to go back to court.
- dylan604 10mo ago> Seems like "national security" has become a phrase that can be used to circumvent many laws By has become, you mean always has been, right?
- bakies 10mo agoI guess I think it used to be more believable that it was used for security, but maybe I wouldn't if I knew better history.
- zmgsabst 10mo agoI’m inclined to believe always — as the case establishing “state secrets” for national security was actually about covering up negligence. https://www.cato.org/commentary/48-crash-us-hid-behind-national-security https://www.cato.org/commentary/48-crash-us-hid-behind-natio...
- BLKNSLVR 10mo agoSince 2001 at least.
- _aavaa_ 10mo agoSince WWII and the bomb. See Bomb Power by Garry Wills
- 10mo ago
- KoolKat23 10mo agoIt's well known ol' Don Quixote doesn't like windmills, I mean wind turbines.
- andyjohnson0 10mo ago> I guess the ostensible "national security" rationale (which clearly is not the only reason!) for this is that turbines severely degrade the utility of radar surveillance along the coastlines. Could it be that they just feel that offshore wind infra is difficult to defend militarily?
- jandrewrogers 10mo agoNo, they aren't any more difficult to defend than any other offshore platform. They do interfere with long-range land-based radar in a way that is problematic with the emergence of shipborne drones.
- triceratops 10mo agoAre they shutting down offshore oil drilling too?
- hammock 10mo agoOrder of magnitude increase in difficulty to defend a wind farm vs an oil rig. Wind farms are dispersed, not continuously manned, harder to monitor/enforce a 500m maritime safety zone of exclusion, have a greater attack surface (subsea cables, substations), and are easier to sabotage with plausible deniability
- sieabahlpark 10mo ago[dead]
- jandrewrogers 10mo agoEven if it is a pretense, it is pretty obvious that this would allow ship-borne drones to use the wind farms as an effective screen. Putting radar platforms beyond the wind farms that are as capable as the existing land-based radars would be quite expensive in both capex and opex. Some of the existing land-based radars would likely need to be moved, ideally. No one was really thinking about this type of threat a decade ago. That said, Democrats have also been trying to stop offshore wind farms for years (e.g. Vineyard Wind), so there is probably bipartisan support.
- Msurrow 10mo agoThe construction on some of these windmill farms started years ago. Before that permits & legal has been in the works for a long time. This surely included security clearances. The orange shrimp pulling the “national security” card now, on the same day as he also creates a new Greenland debacle, is very clearly simply an attempt to strong arm the danish govt into Greenland concessions (in turn simply to please his fractile lille ego)
- jandrewrogers 10mo agoThis reply doesn't address any core point. When these wind farms were permitted many years ago, shipborne drones were not part of the threat matrix. It was considered purely hypothetical even a decade ago because it was not an imminent capability for any country even though e.g. the US DoD had studied it. In the last few years shipborne drones have emerged very quickly as a substantial practical threat, largely due to the Russia/Ukraine war. Governments around the world are struggling to adapt to this new reality because none of their naval systems are designed under this assumption. Whether or not this is convenient for Trump doesn't take away from the reality of the security implications.
- Msurrow 10mo agoYes, it does. First of all: occam's razor. Political theatrics seems simpler than the US defence/intelligence forces sudenly realizing that drones can be launched from ships. Esp. with the timing involved. Second: Established/traditional radar systems cannot spot drones. Take it from someone living in a country that recently had its airspace violated by (assumingly) Russian drones, affecting national infrastructure. It was considered an attack at the time. I don’t think thats the word we use any more, for political reasons. Third: Trump already shut down one of these windmill farms once this year. Until the danish company building the park sued and got the courts word that the shutdown was illegal, and resumed construction. The current shutdown has much larger impact for many multi-national companies. Usually there is a political process expected between allied countries before such a drastisc move. We havnt seen that ie no attempt to solve a concrete (security) issue before punching the red button ie probably because there was no motivation for a solution ie the security issue was probably not an actual issue) Fourth: Earlier this week the danish intelligence services released a new security assesment of USA (that takes Trumps behaviour on the international scene into account). That probably hurt the little mans ego, and now we see a retaliation. This provides yet another motivation for Trumps action, besides factual, real security concerns. Looking at this purely from the security aspect is naive, and fails to consider the context of the real world.
- dfxm12 10mo agoSo clearly this is politically motivated Trump has been charging at windmills ever since he was defeated in UK courts in a case where he didn't like that wind turbines (that provide enough power for 80,000 homes) could be seen from his golf course. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c15l3knp4xyo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c15l3knp4xyo
- Gibbon1 10mo agoCombination of he's vindictive and he's making an example of what happens when you don't preemptively pay him a bribe.
- IndrekR 10mo agoTaiwan strait is filled with offshore wind turbines from both sides. This is not an issue for PRC nor Taiwan.
- hammock 10mo agoEither it is not, or is a huge issue. Those windmills could be deployed on purpose
- the__alchemist 10mo agoYea... I don't trust the motivations, but can confirm that on AA radars looking low (Where you might find UAS or just low-flying aircraft), wind farms show up as clusters of false hits.
- anigbrowl 10mo agoIt's not like they're moving around though.
- the__alchemist 10mo agoYea; it will be obvious if you've accidentally locked into one, then look at it with eyes or other equipment. And the 0 ground speed. But UAS could hide in them effectively I speculate?
- stevage 10mo agoBut if they're just false hits it's easy to filter them out, right?
- the__alchemist 10mo agoYes, but it increases the difficulty of finding an aircraft moving near them.
- jandrewrogers 10mo agoIt is more difficult than you may be assuming. How do you know the hits are false? These "hits" are collections of samples at points in time, not continuous tracks. The "tracks" are reconstructed by making inferences from the samples. Determining whether any pair of sequential samples represents the same entity or two unrelated entities is an extremely difficult inference problem with no closed or general solution. If there is too much clutter, it becomes almost unresolvable. Aliasing will create a lot of false tracks. History has shown that any heuristic you use to filter the clutter will be used by your adversary as an objective function to hide from your sensors once they know you are using it (e.g. doppler radar "notching"). For this reason the inference algorithms are classified but they will degrade rapidly with sufficient clutter no matter how clever. It is a limitation of the underlying mathematics.
- KaiserPro 10mo agohttps://amt.copernicus.org/articles/14/3541/2021/ https://amt.copernicus.org/articles/14/3541/2021/ There is data on what wind turbines do to radar.
- alphazard 10mo agoBringing up a map of wind power deployments tells the story; what you will see is a hot vertical strip in the center of the US. That is where it actually makes sense to deploy windmills, and people will continue to put them there even if subsidies end. It makes sense for the area, the amount of wind, the serviceability of the deployments, etc. Off shore has always been politically contentious because it's much more dependent on subsidies, it's a battle for/against rent-seeking. One party is in favor of this particular kind of rent-seeking and the other party isn't (they will be in favor of a different kind, no doubt). The subsidies are necessary for these deployments to make financial sense, and if they went away, then it would just be a bad place to put a windmill. There is no national security issue, there is no real case for energy infrastructure either. This use case needs government money to make sense, and is therefore sensitive to political fluctuations.
- pbhjpbhj 10mo agoWhy do you say it's rent seeking? Offshore wind is efficient, turbine blades can safely be much larger giving 3x the output, turbine arrays have unobstructed space giving twice the capacity factor. It's more efficient than onshore. You appear to be starting from a premise that wind turbines don't generate profits?
- alphazard 10mo ago> Why do you say it's rent seeking? Because that's what economists call it when you get something for nothing, as is the case with any subsidy. I'm not going to argue this point; interested readers can look up how these energy projects are financed. Windmills that are privately funded, including debt and risk show you where it actually makes sense to put a windmill. > Offshore wind is efficient, turbine blades can safely be much larger giving 3x the output, turbine arrays have unobstructed space giving twice the capacity factor. It's more efficient than onshore. Not going to argue with any of this, although you left out maintenance costs, and larger blades means more value at risk. I'm not convinced that your efficiency calculation is measured in dollars and not windmill hours. I would caution any engineer types reading from pressing their nose too close to the details of a particular energy technology. Instead, it's better to focus on the business plan or economic shadow that a particular energy project leaves. Dollars go in and energy comes out. A bunch of money has to go in up front, then trickles of money slowly over time, and occasionally spikes of money have to go in randomly. In exchange there is a modest, predictable flow of money out, which eventually is larger than all the in-flows in the bull case. The question to ask is: how much in and out of dollars and of Joules at each point in time? How does that compare to hamsters on wheels, people on bicycles, and lighting things on fire? > You appear to be starting from a premise that wind turbines don't generate profits? This was never a stated premise, and my post starts with the opposite sentiment.
- giantg2 10mo agoI'd imagine subsurface detection faces issues with the large electromagnetic fields from generation and transmission too.
- moomoo11 10mo agoWind seems like a waste of money compared to solar. We aren’t the UK where they are a tiny island holding on. We have a massive land area on which we can build solar and plug it into existing power lines or build that part out. Probably way more feasible and better power generation results than building wind out in the ocean.
- AnthonyMouse 10mo ago> So clearly this is politically motivated, and they're using what seems to be a real but solveable concern as a scapegoat. I approve of this, because they were going to come up with an excuse one way or another, but "it's classified" has been a BS excuse that has received far too much deference to cover for all kinds of nonsense going back many decades, and being sufficiently flagrant about it is exactly what it takes to create enough of a backlash to finally do something about it.
- standardUser 10mo agoThat you could come up with one reasonable-sounding explanation while they offered nothing makes me wonder if the administration is too lazy, or too inept.
- me-vs-cat 10mo agoAnyone can land upon a good strategy -- especially because these strategies get honed by evolutionary processes. For them, this is a good strategy. Enough people, especially their supporters, have been trained to not be suspicious when they are non-specific. From my armchair, I don't see any downside to being non-specific in their current environment. Yet the extra delay gained allows so many advantages, if you're the type to use them.
- sl_convertible 10mo agoAlso look at how defensible having your power generation outside your coastline is. This is creating a big vulnerability in your power grid.
- scoofy 10mo agoThe problem is that we have a Congress that cares more about in-group loyalty than they do about idiocy. Meanwhile, we even have Michael Burry pointing out the obvious: we're losing to China because we're not building up every bit of energy capacity that we can. But, sure, why not just ban windfarms in a location perfectly suited to them: https://x.com/michaeljburry/status/2002285483158569147 https://x.com/michaeljburry/status/2002285483158569147
- pclmulqdq 10mo agoThese things are also probably really loud if you happen to have a sensitive set of sonar buoys. I'm not entirely sure how you solve that one, because putting them in deeper water would also make them less effective.
- cr125rider 10mo agoThis seems like maybe the least BS answer. Sub detection.
- janc_ 10mo agoShould be easy enough to use some form of active noise cancelling for that.
- Spooky23 10mo agoThis administration is all about wielding any form of executive power that they can get an unscrupulous lawyer to cook up.
- bvan 10mo agoThis administration is entirely founded on lies. Irrespective of any merits, of any, of its actions it has zero credibility.
- calmbonsai 10mo agoYep. I worked with France's EDF on their offshore turbines https://www.edf.fr/en/the-edf-group/inventing-the-future-of-energy/rd-global-expertise/rd-s-gems/offshore-wind-power/floating-wind-turbines-context-and-ambition https://www.edf.fr/en/the-edf-group/inventing-the-future-of-... . This rationale by the U.S. is total BS.
- einrealist 10mo ago> So clearly this is politically motivated The oil price is too low. Venezuela and now this, it is all part of selling fossil fuels.
- whatsupdog 10mo agoUK has a much smaller coastline, so it might be more cost efficient for them to install extra radars. Also I'm sure the wind turbines interfere in acoustic submarine detection due to the noise they generate.
- somenameforme 10mo agoDeployment of radars on the turbine farms themselves? I don't see how that's supposed to be a good idea. In the scenario we're talking about, war, electricity is one of the first targets. And those relatively defenseless turbines themselves are going to be targeted, and not only by air. The enemy getting to knock out military quality radar setups (which tend to be absurdly expensive), at the same time, is just icing on the cake.
- Denote6737 10mo agoIt's entirely because Scotland put a windfarm off the coast of his golf course. Trump is a child throwing a tantrum.
- im3w1l 10mo agoThis may be the major reason, but I can think of another. How will you protect far away sprawling wind fields from attacks in case of war? They can be attacked by ships, aircraft and subs. You can expect them to be taken out almost immediately imo.
- trymas 10mo agoOnly reason is that orange mussolini does not like seeing wind turbines. That's it. He sees them on Scotland's shores while flying to his resort - like a child he needs to have a personal vendetta on something he does not like, especially now when he has power to do it. God forbid he will need to see such monsters on God loving free country of US of A.