US offshore wind farms are strangled by bureaucracy

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

The Americas' first large-scale offshore wind farms began sending electricity to the Northeast in early 2024, but a wave of wind farm project cancellations and rising costs have left many doubtful of the future of the industry in the United States.

Several big players, including rsted, Equinor, BP and Avangrid, have canceled contracts or sought to renegotiate them in recent months. By withdrawing, companies faced cancellation penalties ranging from $16 million to several hundred million dollars per project. It also led Siemens Energy, the world's largest manufacturer of offshore wind turbines, to anticipate financial losses of around $2.2 billion in 2024.

In total, projects canceled by the end of 2023 are expected to total more than 12 gigawatts of electricity, or more than half of the project reserve capacity.

So what happened, and can the U.S. offshore wind industry recover?

I direct the Lowells Center for Wind-Energy Science, Technology, and Research (WindSTAR) and the Center for Energy Innovation at the University of Massachusetts, and I follow the industry closely. The offshore wind industry's problems are complex, but they are far from dead in the United States, and some policy changes could help it find firmer footing.

A cascade of approval challenges

Getting offshore wind projects permitted and approved in the United States takes years and is fraught with uncertainty for developers, even more so than in Europe or Asia.

Before a company bids for a U.S. project, the developer must plan the acquisition of the entire wind farm, including making reservations for the purchase of components such as turbines and cables, construction equipment and ships. Bidding must also be cost competitive, so companies tend to bid low and fail to anticipate unexpected costs, adding to financial uncertainty and risk.

The winning U.S. bidder then purchases an expensive maritime lease, costing hundreds of millions of dollars. But it does not yet have the right to build a wind project.

Before beginning construction, the developer must conduct site assessments to determine what types of foundations are possible and identify the scale of the project. The developer must enter into an agreement to sell the electricity it produces, identify a point of interconnection to the electricity grid, and then prepare a construction and operation plan, which is subject to further environmental review. This all takes about five years and it's just the beginning.

For a project to move forward, developers may need to obtain dozens of permits from local, tribal, state, regional and federal agencies. The federal Office of Ocean Energy Management, which has jurisdiction over seabed leasing and management, must consult with agencies that have regulatory responsibilities over different aspects of the ocean, such as the armed forces, the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Marine Fisheries Service. as well as groups including commercial and recreational fishing, indigenous groups, shipping, port managers and landowners.

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