Highway Funds Illegally used for Floating Wind Factories – Watts Up With That?

Floating wind is not a highway.

From CFACT

David Wojiick

The Biden Administration is illegally redirecting hundreds of millions of dollars in highway grant money to fund construction of floating wind manufacturing facilities.

The funding mechanism is the INFRA Grant Program in Biden’s Transportation Department. To begin with, here is how the website describes the Program:

“What is the INFRA program?

INFRA (the Nationally Significant Multimodal Freight & Highway Projects program) awards competitive grants for multimodal freight and highway projects of national or regional significance to improve the safety, efficiency, and reliability of the movement of freight and people in and across rural and urban areas.”

Projects typically range from as little as $8 million up to $200 million. Here is their list of eligible projects, which is pretty clear and simple:

“Eligible projects:

A highway freight project on the National Highway Freight Network

A highway or bridge project on the National Highway System

A freight intermodal, freight rail, or freight project within the boundaries of a public or private freight rail, water (including ports), or intermodal facility and that is a surface transportation infrastructure project necessary to facilitate direct intermodal interchange, transfer, or access into or out of the facility

A highway-railway grade crossing or grade separation project

A wildlife crossing project

A surface transportation project within the boundaries or functionally connected to an international border crossing that improves a facility owned by Fed/State/local government and increases throughput efficiency

A project for a marine highway corridor that is functionally connected to the NHFN and is likely to reduce road mobile source emissions

A highway, bridge, or freight project on the National Multimodal Freight Network”

And yet INFRA recently awarded a whopping $426,719,810 for the Humboldt Bay Offshore Wind MVP (Minimum Viable Port) in Northern California. This is not a port in the transportation sense where freight and people get on and off ships. It is where they are going to build a bunch of floating wind turbines, which then get towed out to sea and anchored in a big federal offshore wind lease area. In short, it is a big boatyard.

A boatyard is clearly not eligible for INFRA funding, given the above list. Even clearer is this eligibility statement from the website:

“To be eligible under INFRA, a project within the boundaries of a freight rail, water (including ports), or intermodal facility must be a surface transportation infrastructure project necessary to facilitate direct intermodal interchange, transfer, or access into or out of the facility and must significantly improve freight movement on the NHFN.”

NHFN is the National Highway Freight Network, which the Humboldt Bay production facility has nothing to do with. It certainly is not going to “significantly improve freight movement on the NHFN”, which is the big INFRA grant requirement. In fact, bringing in the hundreds of thousands of tons of steel or concrete needed to make the floaters for the giant turbines is likely to increase freight congestion.

Surely, it is illegal for a Federal Agency to take money that Congress has allocated for a specific program like INFRA and spend it on something else. It seems clear that is what is happening here unless there is some hidden exemption loophole in play, which I doubt very much. To hell with the rules seems to be Biden’s hallmark.

Nor is this a one-shot deal. The State of Maine has an application for an even bigger $456,000,000 grant to build the Sears Island floating wind production site. Maine’s is called the Dirigo Atlantic Floating Offshore Wind Port, but it too is not a port in the transportation sense. It is a boatyard, a place where they make boats, in this case, giant turbine floaters. (Dirigo is Latin for “I lead” and is Maine’s state motto.)

So here we have almost a billion dollars possibly being illegally diverted from INFRA. That means a lot of worthwhile highway projects do not get funded. Moreover, there are more floating wind production facilities in the planning stages to go with the numerous deepwater leases in the works.

Someone in authority needs to take a hard look at these INFRA offshore production facility grants and stop them if they are, in fact, illegal, as they certainly seem to be. If the Biden Administration wants to throw billions at offshore wind production, then Congress must first provide the funds. That is how the American system works.