Constructing a wind power plant off the coast of Southport may be technically feasible, as UNC-Wilmington professor John Bane says, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it makes any sense.

The logic behind a Southport location is based on nearby transmission lines:

The company is interested in Southport because of the transmission lines delivering electricity from the Brunswick Nuclear Plant to customers in North and South Carolina, Bane said, explaining there are “only three places along the North Carolina coast” where a wind farm can be connected to existing power transmission grid – Kitty Hawk, Morehead City and Southport.

But as JLF’s Daren Bakst has explained in significant detail, wind power has fundamental drawbacks that make it too expensive and unreliable. From a “Carolina Journal Radio” interview that aired last year:

Bakst: Well, the wind has inherent problems. It doesn’t blow all the time, so for wind power to actually have any electricity from wind turbines, the wind has to be blowing just right. It can’t be too slow, can’t be too fast. So, most of the time you’re not generating a lot of electricity through the wind turbines, and even when you do, you’d be using the wind power to meet peak demand. Unfortunately, when the grid manager is looking to get electricity to meet peak demand, you can’t count on the fact that the wind is going to be generating electricity at that particular time.

Martinez: Because we haven’t yet figured out a way to control the weather.

Bakst: That’s right. And a lot of the electricity that’s actually generated through these wind power plants as I call them — not wind farms, because that’s what they are — is actually just unusable. It’s generating a lot of electricity that we’ll never actually use. Turn on the switch, it’s not coming from wind power most of the time. The other problem with wind power is, even when you are actually using wind power plants to generate your electricity, there always has to be some type of backup electricity generation, so you’re using a wind power plant, but you have some kind of natural gas plant running as well.

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