But that might have been a mistake, according to Elizabeth Wilson, a wind energy expert and professor of environmental studies at Dartmouth College, who said state and federal leaders should have slowed down wind development during that time instead of leaning in.
“We were building a whole new sector … Building it as rapidly as we had hoped to do was even more ambitious,” Wilson said.
America’s offshore wind industry, Wilson said brightly, is now in a “learning phase.” And considerable learning, she argues, has already happened: State governments are currently more equipped to grow and manage offshore wind power than they were five years ago.
Wilson and three colleagues published a study this month demonstrating that U.S. states, even prior to Trump 2.0, were already “drawing lessons” from the challenges they encountered while trying to launch the nation’s first offshore wind farms.
In New York, for example, state regulators adapted the way they price power purchase agreements to better account for rising costs. In New Jersey, an early oversight in transmission planning led to new requirements for offshore wind developers to show how they would better coordinate transmission across the regional power grid. And throughout the Northeast, state governors — working with federal regulators — identified better processes for compensating fishermen for lost revenue due to wind farm construction.
It’s unclear what learnings will arise from Trump 2.0, but Wilson offered a few preliminary suggestions.
First, regulatory stability is paramount, especially given the industry’s long and cumbersome permitting pipeline. Trump demonstrated how much damage can be caused by a shift in the political winds.
Though it’s impossible to guarantee political stability, Wilson suggested that state and federal regulators could, under a more hospitable future administration, revise the permitting system to at least make it faster and smoother.
After all, European energy developers, who are leaders in offshore wind, were surprised by the fragmented permitting and uncoordinated regulatory landscape they encountered in America, according to Wilson.
This kind of change might address the friction that occurs for projects trying to get approved by multiple governments, which has indeed eroded investor confidence in recent years, according to BNEF’s Sholler.
Klein agreed that coordination between states, counties, and federal agencies could improve, but she also pointed out that the current way of doing things did get results.
“Our permitting process is not broken … We got 11 projects approved,” she said, referencing her time leading the federal branch that regulates offshore wind farms during the Biden administration.
Wilson argues that another “site for learning” would be the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project, which, based on its history of strong bipartisan support, could be a “model of success.”
Klein agreed, calling CVOW, “a little bit of a unicorn.”
The project, located nearly 30 miles off the coast of Virginia Beach, Virginia, has the distinction of being America’s largest offshore wind farm and the only one that is getting built by a regulated utility. The project was slated to feed the grid starting this March — and, prior to last month’s federal pause, was progressing on schedule.
Dominion Energy, the utility building the project, operates under a “vertically integrated model,” said Wilson, giving it a long-term stability that is beneficial to slow-moving offshore wind development.
Virginia is also the world’s data-center capital, with tremendous energy demand that offshore wind is especially good at serving, especially in extreme winter conditions. Thanks to CVOW’s careful site placement and community engagement, opposition from fishermen and local groups has been relatively low, according to Captain Bob Crisher, a Virginia-based commercial fisherman.
Still, the project was ultimately not spared the major political obstacle of a Trump administration stop-work order.
Perhaps the biggest lesson, for Wilson at least, is that hyping the offshore wind industry did little good. The target dates and costs estimated were possibly “overhyped,” she said, leading lawmakers and others who turned a blind eye to the reality of offshore wind farms being, ultimately, megaprojects.
Offshore wind is a megaproject sector, and “megaproject dynamics” are well studied in Europe, said Wilson. These social and political processes are predictable, in that costs always go over, timelines typically run long, and environmental impacts are often not well communicated. Over the years, these inevitable outcomes gave influential offshore wind opponents and GOP lawmakers fodder for pushing back on offshore wind.
“This is a useful framework: Megaprojects are hard,” she said.
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Great Job Clare Fieseler & the Team @ Canary Media Source link for sharing this story.
