Why is the US Afraid of Offshore Wind Power?

This is part of an occasional series examining the slow, stalled or nonexistent progress building out clean tech. The first, on geothermal energy, was published earlier this year.

Two decades ago, the creators of a project called Cape Wind announced a plan to construct “America’s First Offshore Wind Farm” —130 turbines installed across 46 acres in Nantucket Sound that would, they promised, generate enough electricity to power three-quarters of Cape Cod. Years of lawsuits and delays followed. And in 2017, America’s first offshore wind-farm-that-wasn’t finally gave up the ghost, without ever putting up a turbine.

Meanwhile, as offshore wind power proliferated around the coasts of Europe, China and a few other countries, the U.S. seemed to wait for that controversy-plagued “first,” lagging stubbornly behind. The first turbines in American waters, at the modest Block Island Wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island, came online in 2016. An even smaller project in Virginia followed in 2020. And those two projects, totaling just seven turbines and 42 megawatts of capacity, is where the country stands today.

In comparison, just one of the United Kingdom's many wind projects, Hornsea 2, has 165 turbines and 30 times the total offshore electricity generation capacity of the US. China installed more than five gigawatts of offshore wind in 2022 alone; one would need more than 800 of the six-megawatt Block Island turbines to reach that capacity.

If the U.S. is to meet its climate change targets, that stagnation will have to change. The Biden administration has set a goal of having 30 gigawatts’ worth of offshore turbines spinning by 2030, or 700 times the capacity already installed, enough to power more than 10 million homes. And while some larger farms are now under construction or moving through the approvals process, opposition not unlike that seen over Cape Wind’s harrowing 15-year journey continues to pop up. Still, experts see light on the horizon.

“I am hopeful,” said Erin Baker, a professor and faculty director of UMass Amherst’s Energy Transition Institute. “Developers are very excited and willing to make the investment in time as well as money to get turbines in the water here.”

Roadblocks in the ocean

Offshore wind power is a relatively young industry. The first offshore farm was built in Denmark in 1991 (the country now gets around half of its electricity from on- and offshore wind). Since then the technology has progressed dramatically, with turbines continually increasing in size and generation capacity, and certain countries have made installing offshore farms look easy.

In 2022, a total of 8.8 gigawatts of offshore wind were installed globally, and more than half of that was in China, which now boasts about 49% of all offshore wind capacity in the world. China is followed by the U.K., Germany, and the Netherlands. With its measly 42 megawatts, the U.S. accounts for around a tenth of a percent of global capacity. So what has held the U.S. back?

Baker thinks it's regulatory and permit issues. “It is not tech-specific —the east coast is a wonderful place for offshore wind,” she said. (The potential truly is staggering: The U.S. could support upwards of 4,000 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity, if you include the less-proven technology of floating turbines. That’s almost four times all the installed electricity in the country today.)

One regulatory roadblock: The Jones Act, which requires U.S.-flagged vessels bring cargo from one U.S. port to another. Specialized ships are needed to install the massive turbines, and at the moment, most of those are not American. 

“The tendency of Americans to sue and use the legal system is also probably a reason slowing it down,” Baker said. For a long time, Cape Wind was the primary face of that issue, drawing lawsuits from a variety of angles; the opposition to it was extremely well funded thanks to billionaire Bill Koch.

Koch, along with some other critics including the late Senator Ted Kennedy, argued the turbines would create "visual pollution" for their beachfront compounds. They also objected on economic grounds, arguing that it would raise electricity costs (the opposite was likely true, according to some studies done more than a decade ago) and were joined by a variety of groups including in the fishing industry, which said it could interrupt their livelihood. (Some research says this may not be a major problem, like a 2021 study showing no effect of wind farms on a major lobster fishery in the U.K.) In total the group filed more than a dozen lawsuits, managing to tie up the permitting and approvals process for years.

“The project unfortunately demonstrated that well-funded opposition groups can effectively use the American court system to stop even a project with no material adverse environmental impacts,” Ian Bowles told the New York Times in 2017. Bowles was the Massachusetts secretary of energy and environmental affairs under former Gov. Deval Patrick, who had supported Cape Wind while in office.

The scattershot energy policies of the United States are also an issue, especially in comparison to countries in Europe. “In some of those countries, they’ve had a very focused national energy policy and the creation of national incentives that help build the industry and create a market,” offshore wind expert David Bidwell, of the University of Rhode Island, said last year. “That has not happened in the U.S. We don’t have a national energy policy.”

A nascent industry

Though many factors have conspired to slow domestic progress on offshore wind, there are rumblings of an awakening. Vineyard Wind, a 62-turbine project sited farther off the Massachusetts shores than Cape Wind was, and thus not subject to “don’t spoil our view” complaints, is now under construction and slated to come online by the end of this year. South Fork Wind, a 12-turbine project off of Long Island, is expected to deliver power by the end of 2023. Other wind farms in New Jersey, Virginia, New York, and elsewhere are also in the pipeline, with target completion dates ranging from 2024 through the end of the decade.

The companies that build these projects are eager to jump in the water. Last year, an auction held for the rights to build offshore wind across six sites in a region called the New York Bight drew in $4.37 billion, the highest grossing offshore lease sale of any kind in U.S. history, including those for oil and gas. Meanwhile, the Biden administration has made some moves to streamline the federal approval process, which Baker said could be a “game changer” for the industry.

An August report from the Global Wind Energy Council saw good things ahead. “A leap in governmental support and investment, along with ambitious plans for nationwide leases, means the industry is getting ready to unleash its true potential,” the report said. The U.S., it said, has “one of the most ambitious project pipelines” for offshore wind, at 50 gigawatts in total. The passage of the Inflation Reduction Act is also a “significant step forward” for the industry, with provisions offering up $100 million for offshore wind transmission planning, among other things.

But with such a rocky past and that 2030 target looming closer and closer, there are also some ominous signs for the industry.

Whales and oil money

“We oppose your company’s efforts to turn our ocean, coastal ecosystems, and shore communities into industrial electricity generation and transmission power plants.” 

So reads just one bullet point of a letter sent to the CEO of Ørsted, a Danish energy company slated to build the Ocean Wind 1 project, which will put 98 turbines 15 miles offshore of New Jersey. The letter was sent in May of this year by two concerned New Jersey residents, and supported by groups including Protect Our Coast NJ —groups that, reportedly, have a lot of oil industry money behind them.

Opposition to the growing offshore wind industry is growing right alongside it. The loudest concern this time around seems to surround the wind farms’ effect on whales, which at least one expert has called nothing more than a “conspiracy theory.”

Still, the opposition has spread to local and state officials, and some state government opposition to further development does seem to be having a chilling effect: while that New York Bight lease sale brought in billions in competitive bids, the first-ever such auction for territory in the Gulf of Mexico, held in late August, landed with a disappointing thud. After just two rounds of bidding (the Bight sale needed over 60 bidding rounds), one company ended up paying $5.6 million for about 100,000 acres; two other sites received no bids at all. There is speculation that companies’ reluctance to jump in the Gulf relates to Texas’s “antagonistic political climate.”

Capital costs for offshore farms are also rising, making some companies skittish to jump in the water. Still, experts like Baker think good things are coming for U.S. offshore wind.

“I am confident that innovation can address all the hurdles, including innovation in regulation, like streamlined processes; civic innovation, in how developers work with communities and fishermen; technological innovation to help address so many of the challenges,” she told The Messenger. “I am not fully confident we will have the political will to see all of this innovation, but I don’t think any of these things are unsolvable.”