Floating Wind Good, Floating Wind + Green Hydrogen Better
Anyone who thinks rapid global decarbonization is out of reach should take a look at the floating wind turbine sector. Floating wind seemingly popped up out of nowhere in just the past couple of years, and it has already hooked up with the splashy new green hydrogen trend. Too bad those pesky cryptocurrency speculators are sucking up all the clean kilowatts, but that’s another new trend and a whole ‘nother can of worms.
Floating Wind & Green Hydrogen To The Rescue
For those of you new to the topic, putting a wind turbine on a platform that floats is a technologically difficult exercise, but the payoff is huge in terms of rapid decarbonization. Floating platforms can be tethered to the seabed in deeper waters and/or farther from shore, which takes advantage of prime wind speeds while minimizing opposition from coastal communities.
The green hydrogen angle comes in for squeezing the most available juice possible from wind turbines. Hydrogen is a zero emission fuel that can be combusted to run turbines, or deployed in a fuel cell to generate electricity. At the present time, though, almost all of the global hydrogen supply comes from natural gas. That’s going to change because low-cost renewable energy has upended the economics of hydrogen production, making it financially feasible to “split” hydrogen gas from water with an electrical current.
Since hydrogen acts as a transportable energy storage medium, water-splitting provides a way to salvage excess energy from wind turbines or solar panels. The case for wind turbines is especially strong because winds generally pick up at night, when electricity demand goes down.
Other sustainable hydrogen pathways include biogas, industrial waste gas, wastewater, and waste plastics, but water-splitting seems to be attracting the most attention these days.
Pie In The Sky? No, Wind Turbines That Float
Into this picture steps a venture called Cerulean Winds, which has come up with a financing formula for scaling the floating wind-plus-hydrogen connection to the national level.
The idea would have seemed far fetched just a few years ago, but both the floating wind industry and the green hydrogen industry are rapidly maturing.
“Cerulean utilises a tuned infrastructure project finance (IPF) construct with integrated delivery and finance that is proven for the offshore floating environment,” Cerulean explains. “At its core is the comprehensive understanding of risk for floating infrastructure and the most appropriate allocation of these risks across our partner and stakeholder ecosystem,” the company states.
Cerulean’s “Blueprint” model is aimed at cutting the timeline between applying for a license and producing clean kilowatts. According to the company, its Blueprint platform also provides for more flexibility than the conventional centralized power plant structure, which is a key point in the distributed energy landscape of today. Energy storage and cross-border trading are also in the mix.
Serial Oil & Gas Developers Turn To Green Hydrogen
The new Cerulean proposal is billed as the “UK’s largest offshore decarbonisation development.” At a cost of £10 billion, it would sport at least 200 wind turbines floating wind turbines with integrated green hydrogen systems, in two North Sea areas, West of Shetland and Central North Sea.
Before you get too excited, one leading aim of the project is to provide clean electricity to existing offshore facilities, namely, offshore oil and gas drilling sites. Cerulean projects that 3 gigawatts in hourly capacity will go to the oil and gas industry. Still, that leaves 1.5 gigawatts per hour in capacity for green hydrogen production systems to be located on shore.
If the offshore oil and gas angle sounds rather unappealing, it is. However, the reality is that switching millions of automobiles, buildings, and other systems over to clean power is a time consuming process. A movement is already afoot to replace diesel and gas generators on offshore drilling platforms with clean power. The Cerulean proposal is part of that trend, ramped up with the green hydrogen angle.
Cerulean has just submitted a seabed lease request to Marine Scotland, so if anything happens out there in the North Sea it could be a long way off. However, Cerulean has already set the contractor and financial wheels in motion, and in that regard the project does demonstrate that the oil and gas industry could pivot rapidly into low carbon mode, if it chose to do that.
“Cerulean Winds is led by serial entrepreneurs Dan Jackson and Mark Dixon, who have more than 25 years’ experience working together on large-scale offshore infrastructure developments in the oil and gas industry,” the company explains. “They believe the risk of not moving quickly on basin wide decarbonisation would wholly undermine the objectives set out in the recent North Sea Transition Deal.”
To sweeten the pot, Cerulean anticipates undercutting the cost of conventional gas turbine power for offshore platforms. According to the company, oil and gas operators would not incur any up-front costs from the switchover.
Floating Wind, Green Hydrogen, & Green Jobs, Jobs, Jobs
To make the case for speeding up the lease approval process, Jackson and Dixon are appealing to the potential for the wind-plus-hydrogen project to create thousands of new green jobs. Ideally the fossil energy jobs will phase out over time, but in the meanwhile Cerulean aims to show that the floating wind plus green hydrogen combo can maintain employment in the fossil sector while adding new green jobs to the economy, at scale. According to the company’s analysis, over the next five years the project will help preserve 160,000 oil and gas jobs while adding 200,000 new green jobs.
More Bad News For ExxonMobil
“The development of green hydrogen at scale and £1 billion hydrogen export potential” is another key pot-sweetener offered by Cerulean, and that should really give gas stakeholders the heebie-jeebies.
Looking at you, ExxonMobil. In terms of making global decarbonization happen, the company has lagged far behind Shell, BP, and other legacy fossil energy companies. Instead of pumping more money into proven clean tech fields like wind and solar, ExxonMobil banked on algae biofuel while doubling down on shale gas in recent years, apparently with the idea that it could continue making fossil energy relevant by comparing gas emissions to coal emissions.
The idea of natural gas as a “bridge fuel” has fallen flat for a number of reasons, including evidence that the recent spike in natural gas emissions may have offset any gains from pushing coal out of the power generation picture.
Now that hydrogen fuel cell demand is up, ExxonMobil and other natural gas stakeholders are been banking on increased demand for hydrogen to fuel the global economy’s thirst for natural gas. However, schemes like the Cerulean floating wind proposal are quickly shutting that window.
Gas stakeholders could try leaning on the exploding cryptocurrency market to pitch their wares. Speculative crypto mining is an energy intensive process that could help prop up both gas and coal producers for years to come.
To be clear, not all cryptocurrency is speculative. The firm Power Ledger, for example, is deploying a crypto-plus-blockchain model that helps electricity users share excess clean kilowatts.
It’s the speculative crypto market that has become a huge public relations problem for industries looking to decarbonize. Banking, real estate, auto sales and other high-dollar sectors have been getting cryptocurrency-curious, but energy consumption by crypto mining systems has become a public relations ball-and-chain.
As leading global corporations move into the supply chain phase of decarbonization, crypto miners are vulnerable. Switching to renewable energy is one solution, but in the context of the urgent need for climate action, any sector that adds to the global energy demand load will have to make the case that it is not simply playing carbon whack-a-mole with clean energy resources.
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Image: Floating wind turbines via US Department of Energy (credit: Josh Bauer, NREL).
With the federal EV incentive set to expire at the end of September, Ford is urging its dealers to prepare for a rush of buyers.
Ford warns dealers of upcoming EV rush
Like most automakers, Ford is preparing for a shakeup under the Trump Administration. After the “One Big Beautiful Bill” was signed into law on July 4, the $7,500 and $4,000 tax credit for new and used EVs will no longer be available after September 30.
In a memo sent to dealers this week, Ford warned, “demand is expected to increase as the deadline approaches for eligible vehicles.”
The letter (via CarsDirect) confirmed that the EV tax credit “will no longer be available for vehicles acquired after September 30, 2025.”
Ford blamed Trump’s new bill for the expected rush of EV buyers ahead of the incentive deadline. Although the Mustang Mach-E doesn’t qualify for the credit, since it’s built in Mexico, Ford is passing it on through a leasing loophole. While it’s still available, the F-150 Lightning does qualify for the credit when purchased or leased.
Last week, Ford launched its new “Zero, Zero, Zero” summer sales promo, offering a $0 down payment, 0% interest for 48 months, and zero payments for the first 90 days on most Ford and Lincoln vehicles.
The new campaign replaces the employee pricing for all campaign, which ran through the first half of the year. Despite outpacing the industry with overall sales rising 14% in Q2, Ford’s EV sales fell by nearly a third.
Ford spokesperson Martin Gunsberg told Electrek that electric vehicle sales were lower due to the Mustang Mach-E recall and the transition to the 2025 model year. “Our dealers can’t sell what they don’t have,” Gunsberg said.
Although the Mach-E doesn’t qualify for the credit when purchased, it’s still one of the best EV lease deals available right now, starting at $395 per month. The offer is for 36 months with no down payment required.
Ford isn’t the only one preparing for big changes over the next few months. Honda extended its ultra-low lease offer on the Prologue until the end of September. Hyundai and Kia are slashing prices with generous discounts ahead of the deadline. The 2025 Hyundai IONIQ 5 might be the best EV deal at just $179 per month right now.
Looking to snag the savings while they are still available? You can use our links below to find deals on top-selling electric vehicles in your area.
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Environment
Tesla engineer admits Tesla didn’t maintain Autopilot crash records amid trial over fatal crash
A Tesla engineer admitted in court that Tesla didn’t maintain Autopilot crash records before 2018, 3 years after launching the ADAS system, in a trial over the death of a bystander in a crash involving Autopilot.
Tesla is currently on trial in Miami over a crash involving a 2019 Tesla Model S that was operating on Autopilot.
The case attempts to place some responsibility on Tesla for creating complacency with drivers, who were led to believe Autopilot could do more than it actually could.
George McGee was driving his Model S on Autopilot in Key Largo in April 2019 when he dropped his phone and looked down to pick it up when the car blew past a stop sign at a T intersection, and crashed into a parked Chevrolet Tahoe.
22-year-old Naibel Benavides Leon and her boyfriend Dillon Angulo were standing next to the parked Tahoe. Benavides died and Angulo was seriously injured.
The police charged McGee with reckless driving, but the families of the victims sued both McGee and Tesla. McGee settled with the plaintiffs, but Tesla hasn’t.
The automaker has been sued many times over fatal crashes related to its Autopilot and Full Self-Driving systems. Recently, Tesla settled a few of those lawsuits, but this one is the first to make it to trial.
The plaintiffs allege that Tesla’s communications regarding Autopilot have led drivers, such as McGee, to become complacent and use Autopilot in a manner that led to this crash. They also claim that Tesla misrepresented the safety of Autopilot and failed to deploy proper driver monitoring to ensure its safe use.
The trial started on Monday and on Thursday, the jury heard testimony from Tesla software engineer Akshay Phatak who said that Tesla didn’t even complete records of Autopilot crashes before March 2018 (via Law360):
At the end of the first day of testimony, jurors watched part of the videotaped deposition of Tesla software engineer Akshay Phatak in which he said Tesla did not maintain records before March 2018 for evaluating whether it was safer to operate Tesla vehicles with the autopilot engaged or shut off.
When asked if Tesla maintained records or data before 2018 that kept track of the number of crashes that occurred per vehicle mile driven with the autopilot engaged, he replied simply, “No.”
That’s despite Tesla launching Autopilot almost 3 years prior. The jury will hear more of Phatak’s deposition today after Tesla attempted to keep it out of court over claims that it contains “sensitive trade secrets.”
Plaintiffs also challenged Tesla’s Autopilot safety report. We previously highlighted how Tesla suddenly stopped reporting the statistics and only started again a year later, while updating older data.
Dr. Mendel Singer testified on Tuesday and highlighted the discrepancy:
He noted that Tesla offered corrections to the vehicle safety report in January 2023 after finding some errors and miscounts. The crash data for when the autopilot was on stayed about the same, but the crash rate for when the autopilot was off went up by about 50% in the updated report, he said.
Mary Cummings, a professor and director of the Autonomy and Robotics Center at George Mason University and a longtime critic of Tesla’s self-driving efforts, is expected to testify today.
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General Motors and Redwood Materials are joining forces to take EV battery tech beyond the road and onto the grid. The two companies just signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding that sets the stage for turning both new and second-life GM batteries into energy storage systems to support the US’s rising electricity demand.
The collaboration aims to help the grid keep up with the surge in power-hungry applications, from AI data centers to electrified transport and industry.
“The market for grid-scale batteries and backup power isn’t just expanding, it’s becoming essential infrastructure,” said Kurt Kelty, GM’s VP of batteries, propulsion, and sustainability. “Electricity demand is climbing, and it’s only going to accelerate… GM batteries can play an integral role.”
Redwood launched a new venture in June called Redwood Energy that repurposes both new and used EV battery packs into fast and cost-effective energy storage systems. Today’s announcement allows Redwood to use second-life batteries from GM EVs and new GM battery modules to create US-built energy storage systems.
This isn’t just a future plan – it’s already happening. GM’s repurposed EV batteries are currently powering the biggest second-life battery project in the world. Located in Sparks, Nevada, Redwood’s 12MW/63MWh installation is also the largest microgrid in North America and supports Crusoe, an AI infrastructure company.
“Electricity demand is accelerating at an unprecedented pace,” said JB Straubel, Redwood’s founder and CEO. “Both GM’s second-life EV batteries and new batteries can be deployed in Redwood’s energy storage systems, delivering fast, flexible power solutions.”
And the timing couldn’t be better. AI data centers alone are expected to triple their share of US electricity use, from 4.4% in 2023 to 12% by 2028. That’s driving the urgent need for scalable, domestic energy storage.
GM and Redwood Materials say they’ll share more details on their plans later this year.
Read more: Arizona brings a huge grid battery online ahead of peak demand
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