President Biden is betting on offshore wind. In 2021, he announced plans to reach the goal of 30 gigawatts of offshore wind energy capacity by 2030. A year later, he signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law, which included incentives for investing in offshore wind. The IRA extended the eligibility for offshore wind for an investment tax credit (ITC) of 30 percent for at least ten years. The IRA includes bonus credits for meeting domestic content thresholds and per-watt manufacturing credits for domestic production of clean energy technology components.
Biden announced in 2022 an effort to reduce the cost of floating offshore wind by 70 percent. Collective state policies aim to achieve 42,730 megawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2040.
Offshore wind energy has several advantages over land-based wind, including a tendency to be faster than wind energy on land. Even small increases in wind speed can yield significant gains in energy production. Offshore wind also tends to be steadier than on land.
Offshore Wind Energy Benefits In the U.S.
The U.S. is the perfect place for offshore wind. New England, the Great Lakes, the West Coast, and the Gulf Coast each have great capacity for offshore wind development.
New England
New England needs offshore wind to achieve its climate goals, according to a new report by Synapse Energy Economics, Inc. Independent analyses show that the region requires 30 to 45 GW of offshore wind to reach its climate goals by 2050. Adding just nine gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind would avoid 238 trillion British Thermal Units (Btu) of gas usage in 2030. That is equivalent to the natural gas burned in power plants in Connecticut and Massachusetts for one year. It would also prevent one million short tons of carbon dioxide annually. Those benefits have a social cost of carbon value of $3.5 billion.
There are other benefits of nine GW of offshore wind. It would reduce carbon emissions from New England’s power sector by 42 percent. It would avoid 2,300 tons of nitrous oxide, 834 tons of sulfur dioxide, and 641 tons of short-term particle pollution emissions annually. Those emissions reductions would have an annual public health benefit of around $362 million.
This year has already been a watershed year for offshore wind in New England. Vineyard Wind became the first utility-scale offshore wind farm in the U.S. In March, three states (Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island) held a tri-state auction. In April, the Interior Department announced a 14 GW Gulf of Maine auction. On July 2, the Interior Department approved the Atlantic Shores South offshore wind energy project in New Jersey. The project is the ninth offshore wind project approved by the Biden administration.
Midwest
The Great Lakes region has a potential power capacity of 160 GW for fixed bottom turbines and around 415 GW for floating systems. That is more than the annual electricity consumption in five of the eight states that border the Great Lakes. However, there are obstacles to developing offshore wind in the region. One of those obstacles is the narrow locks of the Welland Canal and the St. Lawrence Seaway. Both extend to the Atlantic Ocean and cannot accommodate the big ocean vessels that install offshore wind turbines because they are too narrow. Freshwater ice is the other obstacle. It is stronger than sea ice and more prevalent.
West Coast
The West Coast has 2.8 terawatts of offshore wind energy potential, enough to power 350 million homes. However, the ocean waters are too deep for fixed wind turbines. Floating wind turbines are the answer. In 2022, the federal government sold the first commercial floating offshore wind energy lease areas in the U.S. off the California coast. The same year, California announced a goal of 25 GW of offshore wind by 2045.
The Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) aims to deploy 15 GW of floating offshore wind by 2035. Most floating offshore wind development will probably happen on the West Coast because most areas are deep and need floating platforms.
Gulf Coast
The Gulf Coast has an annual 510,000 MW offshore wind potential, twice the amount of energy needed for the five Gulf states. RWE Offshore U.S. Gulf, LLC bid $5.6 million in 2023 for the Lake Charles Lease area during the first Gulf Coast offshore wind lease sale. That area can support up to 1.24 GW of energy, enough to power almost 435,000 homes.
