July 23, 2021 — Offshore wind farm developers are finding one more thing in common with the fossil fuel industry: community backlash on both sides of the Atlantic.
Much like the resistance to fracking in parts of the U.S. and the U.K., oceanfront towns have fought against power lines running ashore from wind farms, even as the massive turbines themselves are mostly out of sight. In a dramatic move Thursday, New Jersey’s Democratic Governor Phil Murphy signed legislation that strips coastal communities of the right to block buried power lines for projects like Orsted A/S’s Ocean Wind 1 off the state’s coast.
The willingness to squash local opposition highlights one of the dilemmas faced by nations that are aggressively pushing to fight climate change: How to build big clean-power projects quickly when dealing with not-in-my-backyard sentiment. Denmark’s Orsted has repeatedly come across backlash against its wind farms, as have General Electric Co., France’s Alstom SA, Spain’s Iberdrola SA and Sweden’s Vattenfall AB.
“We’re not going to let NIMBYism shut this down,” said state Senator Stephen Sweeney, a sponsor of the legislation and New Jersey’s highest-ranking lawmaker. He added that some residents of Ocean City, a hotbed of opposition in the state, told him they could kill offshore wind. “Ocean City doesn’t get to make the decision for the entire state of New Jersey on a policy initiative. They just don’t.”