Orsted’s Newest Partner in U.S. Offshore Wind Also Holds the World’s Largest Fossil Fuel Portfolio
And they’re fine with investing in drilling for oil in the Amazon, too.
BlackRock, the world’s largest asset management firm, will now become Orsted’s newest partner in U.S. offshore wind.
BlackRock profits from war and it profits from peace. It owns shares in every imaginable company you can think of (examples include Walmart, Uber, Meta, Netflix, Exxon, Chevron, Tesla, Pfizer, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Disney). With assets of over 10 trillion, the company is said to be worth more than the GDP of any country with the exceptions of the U.S. and China.
BlackRock also makes big bucks investing in coal, oil, and gas, having pumped hundreds of billions into the fossil fuel industry (and having recently told a U.K. parliamentary committee that it has no plans to stop investing in those enterprises, which include crude oil drilling in the Amazon). But if there’s money to be made, BlackRock is ready to do business. Now it’s on to U.S. offshore wind.
BlackRock in, Eversource out
Until recently Eversource had been Orsted’s main squeeze in the U.S .offshore wind business, partnering with them on multiple projects, such as South Fork Wind, which just “officially” opened 35 miles off Montauk Point, New York, Revolution Wind, off Point Judith, Rhode Island. and Skipjack Wind, 20 miles off the coast of the environmentally sensitive Delmarva peninsula.
Eversource, however, now wants out of the offshore wind debacle, announcing the sale of its shares of the 12-turbine South Fork and the planned 100-turbine Revolution Wind to Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP) in February citing “increased costs and economic uncertainty.”
But just one month before that announcement, BlackRock stated its intention to acquire GIP for $3 billion in U.S. cash and 12 million shares of BlackRock stock, an amount totaling over $12 billion. The deal is expected to be sealed during the next few months.
Will Orsted return to New Jersey?
What might the partnering of Orsted with cash-rich and ethics-poor BlackRock mean for the two projects Orsted walked away from off the Jersey shore in October of 2023?
In February, as requested by Orsted, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), issued Orsted a two-year lease suspension for its Ocean Wind 1 project. That will benefit Orsted by stopping the clock on its 25-year lease operation term, which started ticking on September 2023. According to BOEM, the lessee (Orsted) has demonstrated good faith and due diligence in its efforts…” By granting this suspension, BOEM says it will “avoid reductions to the length of time when the project is generating power to the grid…”
So obviously lease 0498 – Ocean Wind 1 – is far from gone. It may be renamed, Orsted could resume operations, or the lease could be assigned. Certainly, having BlackRock as a partner ups the ante.
Orsted’s other plan for roiling the waters off the Jersey coast, known as lease 0532 – Ocean Wind 2 – is not quite as advanced and is currently in its “site assessment term,” which runs five years from the lease award in the summer of 2021.
Of course, all of these rules for time frames can be extended. In actuality, Orsted can sit on its leases as long as it wants.
All we know for sure is that it now has a partner with very, very deep pockets that sees the industrialization of the ocean as a profit-making investment. But destruction of the Earth’s resources is nothing new to BlackRock. In 2019 this business behemoth earned the title of the “largest investor in deforestation.”
Black Rock is the worst of the worst.