A state of transition?
PRODUCTION: Biden eyeing Gulf for offshore wind farms
WASHINGTON — Offshore wind farms have always been a tough sell in the Gulf of Mexico — not enough wind most of the year and too much during hurricane season.
But the Biden administration is hoping developers will jump in, announcing this week it is examining the prospect of getting offshore wind farms built in the Gulf, as the administration seeks to quickly expand an industry that so far has struggled to gain ground in the United States.
“This is an important first step to see what role the Gulf may play in this exciting frontier,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said Tues
day. “We know that offshore wind development has the potential to create tens of thousands of good-paying, union jobs across the nation.”
Just last month, the Interior Department approved construction of the nation’s first commercial scale offshore wind farm, the 800-megawatt Vineyard Wind project off the coast of Massachusetts. And the Biden administration is eyeing coastal areas up and down the East Coast, as well as California, as ripe for development, toward getting 30 gigawatts — or 30,000 megawatts — of offshore wind energy built by 2030.
So far the administration has leased close to 1.7 million acres of the Atlantic Ocean for wind farms, stretching from Massachusetts to North Carolina.
With its fluky weather conditions, the Gulf will be a harder sell than the Atlantic or Pacific coastlines. But it also has certain advantages, namely a shallow sea floor on which to place turbines and a homegrown offshore workforce that learned its trade in the region’s oil and gas industry.
“I don’t think it’s a right-now thing,” said Jeff Clark, president of the Austin-based trade group Advanced Power Alliance. “But the beauty of the Gulf is it does have wind, maybe not as strong as the Northeast but more than sufficient, and offshore wind tends to blow more in the afternoon, which correspond well to power demand.”
A study last year by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory found the Gulf had the potential for the development of more than 500 gigawatts of offshore wind energy — more than twice what the states lining the Gulf consume.
The authors recommended further study at six sites along the Gulf, including Port Isabel, Galveston and Port Arthur in Texas, but cautioned that the first turbines would need to be designed to both produce energy from the Gulf’s lower wind speeds and withstand the 100plus miles-per-hour winds that are a fact of life in the Gulf during hurricane season.
In November, Louisiana Gov. John Bell Edwards called on the federal government to launch a task force to establish a clean energy industry in the Gulf, with a focus on offshore wind.
“This is not some ‘pie in the sky’ promise of economic opportunity,” he said. “Louisiana’s offshore oil and gas industry has played a key role in the early development of U.S. offshore wind energy in the Atlantic Ocean.”
Several Gulf Coast oil and gas companies were involved in the construction of the first U.S. offshore wind farm off Rhode Island, including Gulf Island Fabrication in Houston.
“For (Texas) offshore oil and gas workers, you can add additional opportunities through offshore wind because there’s so much similarity,” Clark said.
The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management said it will publish a request for information in the Federal Register on Friday, asking for comment over the next 45 days on offshore wind and other clean energy development off the coasts of Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi and Alabama.