Dream of offshore US wind power may be too ugly for Trump admin
OFFSHORE wind companies have spent years struggling to convince skeptics that the future of US energy should include giant windmills at sea. Their job just got a lot harder with the election of Donald J. Trump.
The Republican president — who champions fossil fuels and called climate change a hoax – has mocked wind farms as ugly, overpriced and deadly to birds. His most virulent criticism targeted an 11-turbine offshore project planned near his Scottish golf resort that he derided as “monstrous.”
Companies trying to build in the US, including Dong Energy and Statoil, are hoping to change Trump’s mind. They plan to argue that installing Washington Monument-sized turbines along the Atlantic coast will help the president make good on campaign promises by creating thousands of jobs, boosting domestic manufacturing and restoring US energy independence.
“We are a billion- dollar heavy industry that is set to build, employ and invest,” Nancy Sopko, director of offshore wind and federal legislative affairs for the industry-funded American Wind Energy Association, said in an interview. “We have a great story to tell to this administration.”
The push to win over the Trump administration comes as offshore wind is on the brink of success in North America after a decade of false starts. Costs are falling dramatically. Deepwater Wind completed the first project in US waters in August. And in September, the Obama administration outlined plans to ease regulatory constraints and take other steps to encourage private development of enough turbines to crank out 86,000 megawatts by 2050. That’s about the equivalent of 86 nuclear reactors.
“We are an industry on the rise,” Thomas Brostrom, Dong’s general manager of North America, said in an interview. “We want very much to come in and explain to the new administration what we can do for job creation and energy independence.”
A White House spokeswoman did not respond to requests for comment.
The stakes are big. Dong, Statoil, Deepwater and other companies secured a total of 11 leases to build offshore wind farms.
To move forward, developers will need permits from multiple agencies and, in some instances, federal grants to refurbish ports. For instance, Deepwater’s 30megawatt wind farm off Rhode Island benefited from a US$ 22.3 million US Transportation Department grant to upgrade piers and terminals for use as a staging area.
To be clear, installing turbines at sea requires years of planning, and Trump may be out of office by the time some developers need federal approvals. State governments, meanwhile, remain the biggest drivers of renewable energy development, because they can mandate that utilities get a certain amount of power from offshore wind or other sources. — WP-Bloomberg