Photo: AFP
The planned windmill farms off the New Jersey coast were always on shaky ground at best, but the energy project is now dead, as President Trump is pulling any federal funding for the project. Few officials are as thrilled as New Jersey Representative Jeff Van Drew (R- NJ 2) that the windmill farms have bought the farm; in fact, Drew wrote the executive order that Trump signed cutting off the funding. He appeared on 710 WOR’s Mendte in the Morning program to explain why the energy plan was nothing but a lot of hot air.
Van Drew told host Larry Mendte he was initially open to the idea of windmill power: “It started out, I was like everybody else, I thought we should evaluate these things, thought about some beautiful windmills in the ocean. I really don’t- I try not to even call them windmills anymore. They’re wind turbines; they’re big, industrial units. They’re over a thousand feet high, and they really dominate the landscape…it was a very bad idea.”
But Van Drew says the aesthetics and appearance were only the tip of the iceberg when it came to reasons why he changed his mind: “Even more importantly than that [was] what it did to the fishing industry… what it did to tourism, what it did to the whales, what it did to the ocean and the environment, what it did as far as concerns with national security because they really could potentially interfere with radar, and then worst of all...what it would do to the [energy] rate payer…who is part of the board of public utilities, said that our utility rates were going to go up a lot- and I want everyone to understand, that would be in North Jersey and South Jersey and along the East Coast. It would be everywhere; these things are extremely costly.”
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