For a long time people believe that wind and especially offshore wind was going to save us all from climate change and whatever else we are causing with our use of fossil fuels today. Now wind and offshore wind in particular are going through rough times. Now if you look at some politicians from stemomons for instance we should believe that everything is okay and that we will have lots and lots of energy coming from the North Sea that will be very cheap and will be enough to satiate all our needs. Now if you look at the plants of the Netherlands I'm going to focus on the Netherlands I live in the Netherlands so if you see what is happening here you know that wind is not going to be a good idea anywhere else. We have the North Sea and the North Sea is a shallow sea so that's a tremendous advantage because that means that you can install your offshore wind infrastructure much more easily than if you have a deep sea. So our plans are to build 70 gigawatts by 2050 and we want to have 21 gigawatts by 2030. Right now we have 6 gigawatts. So the trouble with all these plants is that interest rates are rising, material costs are rising, labor costs are rising. So if you look at you know in total the total construction costs for these offshore wind projects have risen by 30% 30%. So we are basically starting to fail on the easy part of the transition. If we look at the cost not for building the offshore wind farms but for attaching the wind farms to the coast to make sure that you get this transmission network built. I hope you're seated. So the plans we have for 2030 calls for 21 gigawatts of offshore wind attaching that offshore wind capacity to the shore would have cost us about 26 billion euros. So that's more than 1 billion euro per gigawatts. Thanks to all these rising interests, rising costs for labor etc. These costs are now estimated at 35.5 billion. Now I've done some calculations so please bear with me. This might be a little bit dry but I think that it's very important to show you these calculations to basically help you understand what is going on. When we look at these costs and we take the 2030 call of having 21 gigawatts so if we assume 1.5 million euros per megawatt of offshore wind installed so it's actually building the windmills and we add to that the transmission cost of 35 billion euros. Then we have a total investment cost of 67 billion euros for getting 21 gigawatts built and actually attached to the shore. Now if we look at how much these things produce then we may assume that they will produce roughly 2300 terawatt hours over their functional lifespans which is 25 years. Now if we extrapolate the costs for 70 gigawatts then we end up getting a eye watering amount of 223 billion euros. First what we need to establish is whether we would have enough because that's what from stemomones wants everybody to believe that if we build 70 gigawatts of offshore wind then the Netherlands would have all the electricity it needs. It would be super cheap and we don't need anything else especially not nuclear because that's the whole point of this interview that he did. So the Dutch use about 3000 pedagels per year now if we would electrify all of that and we would you know recalculate instead of pedagels we're going to use tarot hours those 3000 pedagels per year would turn into 830. Tarot hours per year these 70 gigawatts of windmills if we assume a capacity factor of 50% which means that half of the year they're actually producing their their maximum rated power output. Then they would produce roughly 300 terawatt hours per year. So we're already 530 terawatt hours per year short of our goal. Now I do want to add this caveat here because it's not certain that we can electrify everything. I'm even very doubtful whether we can electrify half of it. If we could do half of it that would be amazing but I don't think that we can. So we need loads and loads and loads more power and heat to do readers of fossil fuels in the end. Remember that I said that we would be paying 29 euros per megawatt hour for these 70 gigawatts of windmills plus the cost for attaching those windmills. Suppose that we would stick that into nuclear and I'm going to grant telemones that nuclear can be pretty expensive. So let's suppose that we can build a 1 gigawatt power plant for 5 billion euros and we would put those 118 billion euros into these nuclear power plants. Then we could build 24 gigawatts and these 24 gigawatts would produce about 70 terawatt hours less than these windmills would do these 70 gigawatts of windmills. But if you look at the total output over the lifetime when you consider this investment cost and I'm going to be cheeky, I'm going to take 80 years instead of 60. Then the cost per megawatt hour for these plants would be 6 euros per megawatt hour. So that's almost 5 times cheaper than this offshore wind thing. Here's a final thing that I want to say about offshore wind and then I will call it a day. One of the principal objections that I have has to do with security. So when you look at the Baltic Sea, what we've seen in the past two years has been unprecedented. We've seen Nord Stream 1 and 2 being blown up. Now there is a gas pipeline between Finland and Estonia that has been blown up and Sweden has just had an undersea data cable damaged or cut. I don't exactly know what happened. So if we are going to industrialize the North Sea, we are going to put 70 gigawatts of offshore wind there. We're not alone by the way because if you look at the plans of the UK, if you look at the plans of Denmark, if you look at the plans of Norway and Germany and even Belgium, then you see that they want to build 300 gigawatts of offshore wind. Just imagine the volume of cables that will be required to attach all of this stuff to the end user and all of these cables will be lying on the seabed, basically waiting for a rushing submarine or what kind of ship that they use to start cutting cables. So the question is what is wisdom, right? I mean, personally if you would ask me, I would say listen, let's just keep it at 21 gigawatts of offshore wind and call it a day. And let's see whether we still need that in 2021 years, but also build 30 gigawatts of nuclear and some solar and some geothermal. If it makes people happy and they really want to, then by all means, let them do it. Now I would be certain that if we would actually build 30 gigawatts of nuclear and we would have that up and running by, let's say, 2045, that before we would have all that built, we would actually decide to build 60 instead of 30. And we would say, okay, we have this legacy, 21 gigawatts of offshore wind and I mean, we're not going to use that anymore. Let's just tear it down and let's build enough nuclear power plants so that we can do whatever we need to do. So yeah, we're going to do wind, we're going to do lots of wind. Am I happy about it? Absolutely not. Do I think that other countries need to reevaluate their choices? Yes, I do. Do we need to limit the amount of offshore wind we are going to build from a materials perspective? I say yes from a security perspective, I say yes, but also from a grid design perspective, we really should start thinking about limiting the use of offshore wind. If you have anything to add, please sound off in the comments down below. 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