GOLDEN CRESCENT AND 1000 ISLAND NEWS

  Things have gone from bad to worse in Germany this week after a court ruling that’s forcing the government to do something truly shocking: level with voters about how much the net-zero energy transition will cost. Please pass the smelling salts. The country’s highest constitutional court ruled this month that one of the coalition government’s main gimmicks for funding green projects violates Germany’s version of a balanced-budget amendment. That amendment, known as the debt brake, caps the government’s fiscal deficit at 0.35% of gross domestic product per year except in emergencies (as defined by special legislation passed with a majority in the Bundestag). Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s administration had planned to devote €60 billion in emergency borrowing approved (but not spent) during the pandemic to subsidize green projects such as battery production and decarbonized steel. The point was to conceal the true cost of these plans by averting new legislative votes. The judges saw through

  The effort to decarbonize the US electricity grid involves a range of technologies and power sources. Solar is part of the solution, nuclear may also be a component. Battery storage is key. And so is wind — both onshore and offshore. While there are challenges throughout the process, the offshore wind industry in particular has seen a number of setbacks lately, with the Danish company Orsted having recently made headlines for pulling out of a project slated to be built off the coast of New Jersey. Challenges range from surging commodity costs to a scarcity of vessels, the bidding process for deals, and of course, the surge in interest rates over the last two years. On this episode, we speak with Chelsea Jean-Michel, an offshore wind industry analyst at BloombergNEF to get a clear breakdown of the problems, the degree to which these challenges threaten the larger trajectory of the industry, and the efforts to decarbonize the grid. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity. K

  The poster child for the wind-power revolution was supposed to help build America’s clean-energy future. Its messy pullback from the Northeast is threatening those aspirations. Denmark’s national oil-and-gas company, now known as Ørsted, bet big on renewables a decade ago. It renounced fossil fuels, renamed itself after a 19th-century physicist and embarked on a debt-fueled expansion, becoming the  biggest offshore-wind developer  outside China. Surfing investor enthusiasm for all things green,   Ørsted surpassed  BP  in market value early in the pandemic. A hotbed of activity was the U.S., where Ørsted made a play at dominating the nascent wind market. The company lined up high-profile projects off the East Coast championed by Democratic-led states with  ambitious climate targets . Much of that work is at risk of running aground. The company’s cancellation of two New Jersey wind farms on Halloween drew charges of incompetence from the governor and sparked what could be a $300 millio