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lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial
ARTICLE VIEW:
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Offshore wind projects have been dogged by inflation and culture wars.
Now they’re making a comeback
By Ella Nilsen, CNN
Updated:
6:00 AM EDT, Thu April 18, 2024
Source: CNN
After a marked by high costs, accusations of and in 2023, there’s a
sense the US offshore wind industry is on a rebound.
There are now two dozen turbines spinning off the East Coast – a
number set to more than double by the end of the year. New projects are
being announced, and perhaps most significantly, states are actually
signing up to purchase the clean power generated by future ocean-based
wind farms.
“There’s a lot of momentum in the industry right now,” said Sam
Huntington, director of S&P Global Commodity Insights’ North American
power team. “We’re past the nadir of the industry’s troubles.”
Offshore wind is on much more stable footing than it was last year, but
some analysts aren’t ready to declare it a boom. The industry is
still in its infancy in the US and plagued by many of the same problems
as last year – high interest rates and for components like turbine
blades, generators and towers.
And former President Donald Trump – a man with a long disdain for
wind power – is seeking a return to the White House in 2025. Trump
castigated wind as costing “a fortune” and the “most expensive
energy” at a and called wind turbines “a bird cemetery” at a .
But offshore wind is increasingly Trump-proof, according to a top White
House climate official, wind CEOs and an industry analyst. Too much
progress has been made to be fully undone by a second Trump
administration.
Still, White House national climate adviser Ali Zaidi warned that for
the industry to mature and be successful, it needs a friendly
administration willing to push it along.
“The steel that’s in the ground, that’s not going to get pulled
out, that’s irreversible,” Zaidi told CNN. “But if we want to go
from startup to runaway success, we’ve got more work to do, and
that’s going to have to happen as a partnership between the federal
government, state government and the private sector.”
Falling short of ambitious goals
The Biden administration set an ambitious goal for offshore wind
energy: to deploy .
Zaidi is “very confident” they will meet the target. But industry
analysts aren’t so sure.
“We’re not bullish,” Huntington said. “Our latest forecast has
them getting about half of that – 15 gigawatts. Unless a lot of
projects get approved, and Europe gives us a whole bunch of
installation vessels, I don’t see how we’re ramping up to that.”
The administration recently has approved enough projects to eventually
get 10 gigawatts of power on the grid, enough to power nearly 4 million
homes. And the US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management plans to hold up to
four lease sales this year, including ones in the Gulf of Maine and off
the coast of Oregon, which are likely contenders for the industry
experts say the world should be moving toward.
“This year will be a significant year for offshore wind
development,” BOEM director Elizabeth Klein told CNN in a statement.
“This progress is further proof that America’s clean energy
transition is not a dream for a distant future – it’s happening
right here and now.”
Still, it will take years for those approved projects to come online, a
timeline Huntington and offshore wind CEOs say speaks to the continuing
challenges US projects face. Permitting a single project can still take
years because of the multiple federal, state and local hoops developers
must jump through.
Ordering equipment is another challenge. The US supply chain for
offshore wind is still being built; therefore, projects are turning to
European manufacturers to get blades, gearboxes, and other components.
“There’s really only three suppliers that are serving the US
market” for wind turbines and the high-capacity electric cables that
carry electricity back to shore, said Clint Plummer, head of New
York-based company Rise Light & Power, who was formerly at Danish wind
giant Ørsted. “And their lead times seem to continue to get
longer.”
Compounding the problem is the fact that the US industry is so
underdeveloped compared to Europe and Asia, pushing US projects to the
back of the line.
“Because the US is more nascent in the development of our industry
than either of those two mega markets, it simply means that we have
less influence than those other regions in being able to get the
attention of the manufacturers,” Plummer said.
Friendly state and federal governments
Despite persistent headwinds, the biggest change over the past year has
been that the Northeast is signing up for the electricity wind farms
will generate.
There’s a simple explanation for that: New England and Northeast
states want to make their own energy, according to Pedro Azagra
Blázquez, the CEO of offshore wind company Avangrid, which is
developing wind farms off the coasts of Massachusetts and New York.
“For many years, there has been no (power) generation being built,”
Blázquez told CNN. Now, he said, Northeast governors “just want to
make sure their states have energy.”
New York has been aggressively pursuing offshore wind projects,
rebidding previously canceled projects and accepting those projects at
higher prices.
“The fact that that these projects that were in so much trouble were
rebid and accepted at higher prices was a really positive sign for the
industry,” Huntington said. But it will also mean electricity from
wind will initially come at a higher cost, given supply-chain
constraints and high interest rates.
Blázquez and Plummer give the Biden administration high marks for
setting an ambitious goal for offshore wind and trying to ease federal
permitting for the projects. But they’re also not overly worried
about what a Trump administration could mean for the industry.
“Our obligation is to work well with any administration, because what
is clear is these investments bring economic development, they bring
jobs,” Blázquez said.
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