February 16, 2024 — As pleas for government assistance mount, the odds of 30 gigawatts of offshore wind power coursing through the nation’s transmission lines by 2030 are growing longer.
The pendulum has indeed swung against offshore wind as Northeast developers lump insufficient federal and state tax relief with skyrocketing costs, nagging supply chain bottlenecks and cumbersome permitting for, at best, delaying project start-ups. Ørsted’s bombshell decision on Oct. 31 to scrap two wind farms under development off New Jersey put a punctuation mark on a year that saw no less than 4.7 GW of planned wind power temporarily, or perhaps permanently scrapped.
That’s not to say some projects haven’t advanced on schedule, particularly for the consortiums that managed to lock in supplier contracts before inflation and interest rates rose. As of late November, a combined 932 megawatts of first power were on target to begin flowing through the grid at year-end 2023 from two wind farms off Massachusetts and New York. (The first of 12 turbines began delivering power in early December to New York’s Long Island Power Authority (LIPA) grid, marking the first utility-scale wind generation in U.S. federal waters.)
No new projects are scheduled to come online until 2025 when US Wind is expected to begin generating roughly 270 MW from its MarWin offshore wind farm off Ocean City, Md.