Biden announces plan to revive offshore wind industry

The Biden administration today ad a plan to get our booming offshore wind industry off the ground, that is, to increase the number of operational offshore wind farms to more than one. As the announcement points out, that’s enough to power 10 million homes. The administration expects the plan to create around 77,000 jobs between the industry and surrounding communities.

This is a giant leap from where we are today, with a concrete plan for swift action, but we will still be a long way from realizing our potential to derive a substantial part of the electricity.

The plan aims to produce 30 gigawatts of energy by 2030, multiplying offshore wind production by a thousand; but comparatively, in 2020, the United States had the ability to generate 1,117 gigawatts from all sources per year. The plan would save us 78 million metric tonnes of CO2 emissions, which is a small nick in our annual average release of more than 5 billion metric tonnes of carbon dioxide linked to energy.

Last year, when Representative Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) proposed a bill targeting 25 gigawatts of offshore wind farms, Earther’s Dharna Noor recognized that the bill was ambitious for this country, but still left us far behind in Europe. At Biden’s pace, ten years from now the whole of the United States would still produce only about three-quarters of the offshore wind power like the UK alone. The energy department reported that the United States has over 30 offshore wind projects in development, while the United Kingdom already has 40. And if the commitment of Boris Johnson is full, offshore wind will generate enough to power every home in the UK by 2030.

The administration has designated a new wind power area in New York Bight, a section of the Atlantic ocean extending inland near New Jersey and Long Island (regions where some NIMBYs did not take kindness to their sight). The Biden administration has also incited an acceleration for the approval of a wind farm off Martha’s Vineyard.

Admittedly, it took decades for Europe to build its vast wind power grid, which product 80% of global offshore wind energy (85 gigawatts) and employs more than 210,000 people. The Biden administration’s plan is to catch up, inject $ 3 billion in industry loans, $ 230 million into ready ports, $ 8 million for research and development projects, and urge the Office of Ocean Energy Management of the Ministry of the Interior to accelerate the review of 16 construction plans. This last part is a reversal of the Trump era; a Center for American Progress report found that during the pandemic, the DOI gave oil and gas companies rental breaks on public land while slapping wind and solar power with bills.

So nice to have the show on the road, a road presumably filled with a lot more electric vehicles. On Twitter, Bill McKibben highlighted that the US is still “badly” dragging the EU’s offshore wind capacity, but added that the Biden plan “looks like the start of something big.