The federal government is moving quickly to develop offshore wind farms along all three U.S. coasts. The Biden administration has set a goal to deploy 30 gigawatts of offshore wind energy by 2030, enough to power 10 million homes and cut 78 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions.
The latest news is a proposal for floating offshore wind projects along the Pacific Coast since California’s ocean waters are too deep for the fixed-bottom wind turbines that have been deployed off the Atlantic coast.
The Interior Department plans to hold an offshore wind energy lease sale on December 6 for areas off central and Northern California. This will be the first offshore wind lease sale on the West Coast. The sale will include five lease areas totalling 373,268 acres. The large-scale projects that would be developed could one day generate more than 4.5 gigawatts of energy and power 1.5 million homes, the department said. By 2035, Interior aims to have 15 gigawatts of floating offshore wind capacity.
The announcement, reported Nichola Groom of Reuters, “is the latest in a government push to put wind turbines along U.S. coastlines, creating a new domestic jobs engine.”
Jobs are also top of mind along the Gulf Coast, where the Biden administration is planning to conduct additional lease sales. Erik Milito, president of the National Ocean Industries Association, a trade group that represents both the offshore oil and wind industries, said, “Steel fabricators, heavy lift vessel operators, marine construction firms, subsea engineers, seismic surveyors, and a host of other jobs and businesses that are integral to Gulf of Mexico oil and gas development are also building out American offshore wind,” Milito said in an email to The Washington Post’s Maxine Joselow. “There is a reason the first U.S.-built offshore wind substation is being constructed in Ingleside, Texas.”
Most of the offshore wind activity has been in New England and farther down the Atlantic Coast. New York State now has five offshore wind projects in active development – the largest offshore wind pipeline in the nation, totaling more than 4,300 megawatts and representing nearly 50 percent of the capacity needed to meet New York’s nation-leading offshore wind goal of 9,000 megawatts by 2035. New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Maryland are among the other states moving forward to take advantage of their offshore winds.
President Biden has directed the Interior Department to pursue wind development off the coasts of Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas, rescinding an executive order that President Donald Trump signed in 2020. Trump’s order banned all offshore energy development, including oil- and wind-power lease sales, in the southeast Atlantic.
Of course, there will be challenges in moving all these projects from the drawing boards. Some opponents of offshore turbines have asserted that they mar ocean scenery. That may not be an issue with the California proposals since the floating turbines would likely be more than 20 miles offshore. But, as The Wall Street Journal’s Katy Stech Ferek pointed out, “there are potential conflicts with the commercial fishing boats, the shipping industry, marine researchers, tourists and the U.S. military. Those include everything from worries about sea turtles and other marine life to obstacles such as shipping routes and underwater telecommunication cables.”
The nation’s first offshore wind project, off Block Island along the Rhode Island coast, started generating electricity in late 2016. With a boost from the Inflation Reduction Act’s incentives, the United States is now on the verge of a giant leap forward. That appears to be true internationally, as well. Offshore wind will account for 25 percent of global renewables investments in 2030, up from six percent in 2020, the consultancy Wood Mackenzie estimates.