With more than 90,000 miles of coastline, the country has
plenty of places to plunk down turbines. But legal, environmental and economic
obstacles and even vanity have stood in the way.
President Biden wants to catch up fast — in fact, his
targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions depend on that happening. Yet
problems abound, including a shortage of boats big enough to haul the huge
equipment to sea, fishermen worried about their livelihoods and wealthy people
who fear that the turbines will mar the pristine views from their waterfront
mansions. There’s even a century-old, politically fraught federal law, known as
the Jones Act, that blocks wind farm developers from using American ports to
launch foreign construction vessels.
Offshore turbines are useful because the wind tends to blow
stronger and more steadily at sea than onshore. The turbines can be placed far
enough out that they aren’t visible from land but still close enough to cities
and suburbs that they do not require hundreds of miles of expensive
transmission lines.
The Biden administration wants up to 2,000 turbines in the
water in the next eight and a half years. Officials recently approved a project
near Martha’s Vineyard that languished during the Trump administration and in
May announced support for large wind farms off California’s coast. The $2
trillion infrastructure plan that Mr. Biden proposed in March would also
increase incentives for renewable energy.
The cost of offshore wind turbines has fallen about 80
percent over the last two decades, to as low as $50 a megawatt-hour. While more
expensive per unit of energy than solar and wind farms on land, offshore
turbines often make economic sense because of lower transmission costs.
“Solar in the East is a little bit more challenging than in
the desert West,” said Robert M. Blue, the chairman and chief executive of
Dominion Energy, a big utility company that is working on a wind farm with
nearly 200 turbines off the coast of Virginia. “We’ve set a net-zero goal for
our company by 2050. This project is essential to hitting those goals.”
The slow pace of offshore wind development highlights the
trade-offs between urgently addressing climate change and Mr. Biden’s other
goals of creating well-paying jobs and protecting local habitats. The United
States could push through more projects if it was willing to repeal the Jones
Act’s protections for domestic shipbuilding, for example, but that would
undercut the president’s employment promises.
These difficult questions can’t simply be solved by federal
spending. As a result, it could be difficult or impossible for Mr. Biden to
eliminate greenhouse gas emissions from the power sector by 2035 and reach
net-zero emissions across the economy by 2050, as he would like.
“I think the clear fact that other places got a jump on us
is important,” said Amanda Lefton, the director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy
Management, the agency that leases federal waters to wind developers. “We are
not going to be able to build offshore wind if we don’t have the right
investments.”
Europe’s head start means it has established a thriving
complex of turbine manufacturing, construction ships and an experienced work
force. That’s why the United States could have to rely on European components,
suppliers and ships for years.
Installing giant offshore wind turbines — the largest one,
made by General Electric, is 853 feet high — is difficult work. Ships with
cranes that can lift more than a thousand tons haul large components out to
sea. At their destinations, legs are lowered into the water to raise the ships
and make them stationary while they work. Only a few ships can handle the
biggest components, and that’s a big problem for the United States.
A 1,600-Mile Round Trip to Canada.
Lloyd Eley, a project manager, helped build nuclear
submarines early in his career and has spent the last eight years at Dominion
Energy. None of that quite prepared him for overseeing the construction of two
wind turbines off the Virginia coast.
Mr. Eley’s biggest problem was the Jones Act, which requires
ships that travel from a U.S. port to anywhere within the country, including
its waters, to be made and registered in the United States and owned and
staffed by Americans.
The largest U.S.-built ships designed for doing offshore
construction work are about 185 feet long and can lift about 500 tons,
according to a Government Accountability Office report published in December.
That is far too small for the giant components that Mr. Eley’s team was working
with.
So, Dominion hired three European ships and operated them
out of the Port of Halifax in Nova Scotia. One of them, the Vole au Vent from
Luxembourg, is 459 feet (140 meters) long and can lift 1,654 tons.
Mr. Eley’s crew waited weeks at a time for the European
ships to travel more than 800 miles each way to port. The installations took a
year. In Europe, it would have been completed in a few weeks. “It was
definitely a challenge,” he said.
The U.S. shipping industry has not invested in the vessels
needed to carry large wind equipment because there have been so few projects
here. The first five offshore turbines were installed in 2016 near Block
Island, R.I. Dominion’s two turbines were installed last year.
Had the Jones Act not existed — it was enacted after World
War I to ensure that the country had ships and crews to mobilize during war and
emergencies — Dominion could have run European vessels out of Virginia’s ports.
The law is sacrosanct in Congress, and labor unions and other supporters argue
that repealing it would eliminate thousands of jobs at shipyards and on boats,
leaving the United States reliant on foreign companies.
Demand for large ships could grow significantly over the
next decade because the United States, Europe and China have ambitious offshore
wind goals. Just eight ships in the world can transport the largest turbine
parts, according to Dominion.
Dominion is spending $500 million on a ship, being built in
Brownsville, Texas, that can haul large wind equipment. Named after a sea
monster from Greek myth, Charybdis, the ship will be 472 feet (144 meters) long
and able to lift 2,200 tons. It will be ready at the end of 2023. The company
said the ship, which it will also rent to other developers, would let it
affordably install roughly 200 more turbines by 2026. Dominion spent $300
million on its first two but hopes the others will cost $40 million each.
Fishermen Fear for Their Livelihoods.
For the last 24 years, Tommy Eskridge, a resident of Tangier
Island, has made a living catching conchs and crabs off the Virginia coast.
One area he works is where Dominion plans to place its
turbines. Federal regulators have adjusted spacing between turbines to one
nautical mile to create wider lanes for fishing and other boats, but Mr.
Eskridge, 54, worries that the turbines could hurt his catch.
The area has yielded up to 7,000 pounds of conchs a day,
though Mr. Eskridge said a typical day produced about half that amount. A pound
can fetch $2 to $3, he said.
Mr. Eskridge said the company and regulators had not done
enough to show that installing turbines would not hurt his catch. “We just
don’t know what it’s going to do.”
Annie Hawkins, executive director of the Responsible
Offshore Development Alliance, which includes hundreds of fishing groups and
companies, worries that the government is failing to scrutinize proposals and
adequately plan.
“What they’re doing is saying, ‘Let’s take this thing we’ve
really never done here, go all in, objectors be damned,’” Ms. Hawkins said.
“Coming from a fisheries perspective, we know there is going to be a
massive-scale displacement. You can’t just go fish somewhere else.”
Fishing groups point to recent problems in Europe to justify
their concerns. Orsted, the world’s largest offshore wind developer, for
example, has sought a court injunction to keep fishermen and their equipment
out of an area of the North Sea set for new turbines while it studies the area.
Orsted said that it had tried to “work collaboratively with
fishermen” but that it had sought the order because its work was complicated by
gear left in the area by a fisherman it could not identify. “To safely conduct
the survey work and only as a last resort, we were left with no choice but to
secure the right to remove this gear,” the company said in a statement.
When developers first applied in 2001 for a permit for Cape
Wind, a project between Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, resistance
was fierce. Opponents included Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts
Democrat who died in 2009, and William I. Koch, an industrialist.
Neither wanted the turbines marring the views of the coast
from their vacation compounds. They also argued that the project would obstruct
16 historical sites, disrupt fishermen and clog up waterways used by humpback,
pilot and other whales.
After years of legal and political battles, the developer of
Cape Wind gave up in 2017. But well before that happened, Cape Wind’s troubles
terrified energy executives who were considering offshore wind.
Projects up and down the East Coast are mired in similar
fights. Residents of the Hamptons, the wealthy enclave, opposed two wind
development areas, and the federal government shelved the project. On the New
Jersey shore, some homeowners and businesses are opposing offshore wind because
they fear it will raise their electricity rates, disrupt whales and hurt the
area’s fluke fishery.
Energy executives want the Biden administration to mediate
such conflicts and speed up permit approval.
“It’s been artificially, incrementally slow because of some
inefficiencies on the federal permitting side,” said David Hardy, chief
executive of Orsted North America.
Renewable-energy supporters said they were hopeful because
the country had added lots of wind turbines on land — 66,000 in 41 states. They
supplied more than 8 percent of the country’s electricity last year.
Ms. Lefton, the regulator who oversees leasing of federal
waters, said future offshore projects would move more quickly because more
people appreciated the dangers of climate change.
“We have a climate crisis in front of us,” she said. “We
need to transition to clean energy. I think that will be a big motivator.”
