To decarbonize, New England is betting big on offshore wind. Can it deliver?

Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee speaks at an event in June in Providence marking completion of offshore turbine components for the Revolution Wind project. New England’s push into offshore wind comes amid longstanding apprehension by federal regulators and the nation’s electric reliability watchdog over New England’s dependence on natural gas power generation, worrisome when paired with its constrained pipeline capacity during extreme cold.  (Robert Zullo/ States Newsroom)

PROVIDENCE — Dozens of hard hats and yellow safety vests were neatly placed on folding chairs. A giant American flag hung from the rafters of a hangar-sized fabrication building. And cellophane-wrapped cookies with blue icing spelling out “Revolution Wind, powered by Ørsted and Eversource,” added the final celebratory touch.

After a rough year for the fledgling U.S. offshore wind industry, the crowd of union leaders, energy company representatives, state and federal officials, media and other guests at the Port of Providence on June 13 were marking the final assembly of the advanced foundation components for the Revolution Wind project, a 700-megawatt offshore wind farm currently under construction 12 miles southwest of Martha’s Vineyard that will deliver energy to Rhode Island and Connecticut.

Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee called the now- bustling port — packed with offshore wind turbine components and hosting a gleaming new crew service vessel built for Ørsted , the Danish offshore wind giant, docked nearby —  “an example of what can happen all around the country.” The construction progress “marks a pivotal moment, not just for Rhode Island but our country’s offshore wind industry,” McKee added.

Other governors across New England are banking big on the mammoth turbines being installed off the coast to not only keep the lights on as the region moves toward cleaner electricity, but also to meet a surge in power demand from electric vehicles and a shift to electrified home heating. The region’s push into offshore wind comes amid longstanding apprehension by federal regulators and the nation’s electric reliability watchdog over New England’s dependence on natural gas power generation, worrisome when paired with its constrained pipeline capacity during extreme cold.

Whether the hundreds of turbines planned to spring up off the coast — and the major grid upgrades needed to get that power to where it’s needed — can reliably meet those expectations will come down in large part to timing, experts say. That includes not just how fast developers, who are facing supply chain problems and sometimes stiff local resistanc e and have complained about permitting delays , can get turbines built, but also when the expected demand increase from an electrified future materializes. Also in the mix: how quickly the system is able to inject the power produced offshore and whether it can handle the dips in output that can come with variable generation, said John Moura, director of reliability assessment at the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, which sets and enforces standards for the American power system.

“They can build and design this, it’s really about time, money and the will to do that,” Moura  said. “The timing piece is the part we’re most concerned with.”

‘Moving in the same direction’

The New England Independent System Operator runs the electric grid for Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut, ensuring that there’s enough electric supply to match demand in real time. What helps make that somewhat easier than in regions overseen by othe r multi-state regional transmission organizations is broad alignment among its member states on energy policy. All six have clean power goals. Rhode Island is pushing for 100% renewable power by 2030 . Connecticut is requiring 100% zero carbon power by 2040. Massachusetts wants to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 . In June, Vermont’s legislature overrode a gubernatorial veto to enact a 100% renewable energy by 2035 standard. Maine is aiming to get to 80% percent renewable power by 2030 and 100% by 2050. New Hampshire is something of an outlier, but even it has a renewable energy portfolio standard that requires utilities to purchase increasing amounts of renewable energy certificates .

“They’re all more or less moving in the same direction,”  said Matt Kakley, a spokesman for ISO New England. That can make debates over longer term transmission planning and improving processes to determine who pays for what less fraught than elsewhere . Even before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s landmark order on transmission planning and cost allocation earlier this year, there was broad agreement among New England states on a new framework that was approved by FERC in July to plan for state renewable goals and how to allocate costs of associated network upgrades.
“Our hope is that this kind of allows us to get to work on as a region, on some of the stuff that we know is coming,” Kakley said. If the states’ decarbonization goals are to be met,  Kakley said, that means an estimated doubling of electricity use in New England over the next 30 years and a tripling of the winter energy peak.

“On the transmission side, we’re in good shape right now,” Kakley said. “However, we know, if we’re going to move to a system that’s largely powered by offshore wind, that’s going to trigger the need for upgrades, not in the initial wave but when you start looking at the bigger quantities.”

‘An iceberg out there’

In 2023, about 49% of New England’s electricity was supplied by natural gas power plants. Nuclear plants accounted for 20% and renewables made up 10%, with hydropower, oil and imports from other regions comprising the rest. Coal, which was about 18% of the region’s power generation in 2000, was just .2%. The last coal plant in New England, Granite Shore Power’s Merrimack Station near Concord, New Hampshire, is scheduled to close in 2028 and will host solar and battery storage. At the moment, there are about 1,400 megawatts of wind power on the system. Developers are proposing nearly 18,000 megawatts, most of it offshore wind off the coast of southern New England.

“There’s an iceberg out there,” Kakley said. “That’s a lot of the work that’s going on right now, on transmission, on energy adequacy, on everything really.”

Both Moura, the NERC official, and Kakley said the initial wave of offshore wind projects will be able to connect to the grid and be managed by the system relatively easily. Moura noted, however, that grid operators have to plan for the potential loss of that power in the event of a wind “drought.” And while offshore wind power is generally more constant than the onshore variety, there are concerns that a loss of wind could leave the entire New England grid in a lurch.

New England’s grid operator would struggle mightily to make up for a loss of some 8,000 megawatts of wind power, for example, Moura said, which would be about a quarter of the total power generation currently on the system. “They just don’t have the reserves on their system to compensate for that,” Moura said.

Kakley acknowledged that keeping that enough extra electric generation capacity around will fall in large part to the ISO’s capacity market, which provides financial incentives to power plants so that they can be called upon in times of high grid stress, particularly natural gas plants, which are able to ramp up and down rapidly.

“What we are projecting in some of our analyses is that the natural gas units will still be needed, as balancing resources, but that they would be expected to run less. And so that’s why you see the projections that they’ll be accounting for 12% of annual energy use instead of 49%. …And so the expectation would be that there would be a greater emphasis put on capacity market revenues as these resources earn less in the energy market,” he said. There are other efforts to bring more power online, such as the New England Clean Energy Connect transmission project to bring hydropower from Quebec into the region through Maine.

ISO New England’s key to a successful transition to clean energy, Kakley said, is called the “ four pillars” framework. The first is building “massive amounts” of clean energy to replace fossil fuels on the system and meet growing power demand from electrification of home heating and transportation. The second is ensuring there are balancing resources (a role currently played by gas power but one that could in the future also be filled by batteries and alternative fuels like hydrogen ) to smooth out fluctuations in output from wind and solar. The third is energy adequacy, ensuring, as in Moura’s point, that there are always enough power generators to meet extreme weather and handle a changing power mix. The fourth is a beefed up transmission system as new sources of power become “greater in number and more geographically dispersed.”

“Those are the four big buckets of items that we are focused on, that the New England states are focused on, and looking at making sure that none of them get out of balance,” Kakley said. “Because if you succeed in three pillars, but not the fourth, you’re going to have a problem. … If you see the electrification of the heating and transportation sectors take off faster than the offshore wind development, you could find yourself in a problem.”

“I don’t like the term ‘co-exist’”

And there’s been reason to worry that offshore wind development might lag. For the past year, developers have struggled with supply chain problems and spiking costs driven by inflation, forcing some East Coast projects to be canceled or renegotiated . The projects have also been in some cases vehemently opposed by coastal communities and dogged by ( spurious, according to marine mammal experts and federal agencies) accusations that they’re harming whales, along with lawsuits from fishermen and, in at least one case, preservationists worried about losing ocean views . This month, part of a blade broke off of a turbine that was part of Vineyard Wind 1, the nation’s first commercial scale offshore wind project, leaving fiberglass and foam debris to wash up on Nantucket beaches .

The Maine Lobstermen’s Association, which represents hundreds of people who make a living hauling the famous crustacean out of the water for diners around the world, has been a major opponent of offshore wind potentially encroaching on fishing areas.  The federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which oversees offshore wind leases areas, is moving forward with a l ease sale in the Gulf of Maine that largely excludes the areas used by the state’s lobster boats.

But Patrice McCarron, the group’s policy director, isn’t backing off of criticizing the proposal.

“Nobody in the fishing industry thinks the Gulf of Maine is a good place to develop offshore wind,” she said in an interview in June at the organization’s cramped offices in Kennebunk. “It’s one of the most productive ecosystems in the world. It supports one of the most valuable fisheries, if not the most valuable fishery in the nation, which is lobster.”

People who might not have seen offshore wind development up close can have a distorted sense of what it is in practice, she added.

“If you don’t fish, you think of offshore wind as being something very green, something that’s going to solve climate change, something that’s good for the environment. If you’re a fisherman, you think about what it actually is, you know, 800-plus foot turbines floating on concrete blocks that are 300 feet by 300 feet with turbine blades that are at the length of a football field.”

McCarron said the fishing industry also worries about loss of habitat, impacts on marine species, potential vibrations and other effects and, the uncertainty of floating offshore wind technology , which is what would be developed in the deep waters of the Gulf of Maine but is relatively rare still. (One offshore wind executive told States Newsroom that Gulf of Maine turbines aren’t expected to happen for about a decade)   “I don’t like the term ‘coexist,’” she said. “It just defies logic that you would industrialize a place that is so special and that fishermen have done such a great job of taking care of and stewarding. Nobody wants to see this built.”

Solid fundamentals

Less than 100 miles south of McCarron’s office, wind developers, state and federal officials and others with ties to the industry were still optimistic on the prospects for offshore wind at a conference in Boston organized by Reuters. However, panels with names like “How to navigate growing pains,” “Risk mitigation,” “How to overcome critical supply chain bottlenecks,” “Confronting transmission complexities” and “How to deal with misinformation” spoke to the rough seas companies pushing offshore wind projects have had to sail over the past year. There were also official as well as side-channel conversations about the election and what kind of blow a second Trump administration might deal to offshore wind.

But the through line of the conference was that the fundamentals underlying offshore wind — a large untapped source of relatively steady clean energy close to the coastal cities that are big drivers of electric demand — remain strong. And state and local officials are still keen on the jobs and economic impact that can come from standing up a new American industry.

“I would look to Virginia, as for me, giving me some optimism for the industry, for the future,” said Diane Leopold, chief operating officer of Virginia-based utility giant Dominion Energy, which is building the 2,600-megawatt Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project off the coast of Virginia Beach, the largest offshore wind farm under construction in the U.S. Leopold touted the project’s strong bipartisan support. “It supports climate change. Large businesses in the state want renewable energy. We have a fast growing load in the state, and offshore wind produces a lot of megawatt hours and it creates a diversity of supply that really helps grid reliability. And then, of course, offshore wind creates an enormous number of jobs and a lot of local economic activity.”

Chris Wissemann, CEO of Diamond Offshore Wind, a developer, said the industry is on the path to recovery, with states and developers now negotiating agreements that include mechanisms to adjust prices to respond to inflation and other problems.

“This has been a sobering event that is maybe once in a generation,” he said. “To a great extent what we’re doing in offshore wind as a country we haven’t done since nuclear power in the 60s and 70s and all of those projects were essentially ratepayers paid whatever they cost to build because you were doing them for the public benefit. I think a little of that needs to come into this market.”

European companies, he added, sold regulators on the promise that they could build as easily as in Europe. “This has been sobering to a lot of the Europeans catching on that the U.S. is a bit different: building the supply chain here and getting things permitted, dealing, honestly, with our political dysfunction. It’s a real issue, right?”

SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX

The post To decarbonize, New England is betting big on offshore wind. Can it deliver? appeared first on Rhode Island Current .