If the first week of 2024 is any indication, this will be an eventful year for the fledgling U.S. offshore wind energy industry.
In a major milestone on Tuesday, a large-scale project called Vineyard Wind delivered its first electricity to New England’s grid system. On Wednesday, however, the companies behind another major wind project planned for New York’s waters, Empire Wind 2, announced they were terminating their contract, citing rising construction costs.
The back-to-back developments demonstrate both the great potential and growing pains for wind power along the East Coast. Empire Wind’s demise is a “near-term setback,” according to renewable energy analyst Timothy Fox, managing director for ClearView Energy Partners in Washington, D.C. But Fox said the Vineyard Wind success is more indicative of the longer trend.
“We see considerable growth opportunity for U.S. offshore wind—it’s just going to be on a longer and flatter trajectory than first envisioned,” Fox told Newsweek.
The stakes are high for how we will power some of the country’s most populous places while cutting the greenhouse gas emissions contributing to climate change. Offshore wind is especially important for the Northeast U.S., where electricity demand is high, the wind is strong over the ocean and space is limited for wind farms on land.
This year is shaping up as an inflection point as the industry adjusts to new economic realities of inflation and high interest rates and looks ahead to an uncertain political landscape.
A Step Forward
Vineyard Wind—named for the nearby island of Martha’s Vineyard off the southern coast of Cape Cod—is not the nation’s first commercial offshore wind project. That honor went to a small project near Block Island in Rhode Island, which has five turbines that started spinning in 2016. Another project in Virginia’s waters followed, for a combined total of 42 megawatts of electricity capacity in U.S. waters, according to the Department of Energy.
What’s different about Vineyard Wind is size. Officials at the project’s lead developer, Avangrid, said the project will have 62 wind turbines when it is completed, generating
