December 1, 2022 — The agency tasked with realizing President Joe Biden’s offshore wind ambitions needs to move fast.

To meet the administration’s larger decarbonization goals, the White House wants to help raise 30 gigawatts of offshore wind power by 2030 — a pledge that will require pushing 16 individual wind farms through the regulatory gauntlet by the end of Biden’s first term.

So far, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management has only approved two of those farms.

“Industry is kind of concerned that projects aren’t quite getting through the permitting phase quick enough,” said Sam Salustro, vice president of strategic communications at the Business Network for Offshore Wind. “We really have to keep the pace up or even accelerate it to hit not only BOEM’s identified goals but our shared national goals.”

With the recent midterm elections ushering in a partial resurgence of GOP power on Capitol Hill, the pressure on the administration to future-proof the wind industry will only grow. This could become even more crucial if the levers of power fully flip with the 2024 election and a Republican president less keen on advancing renewables over fossil fuels is elected.

The politics matter because the offshore wind industry is at a pivotal moment — poised to rapidly expand in the United States but pressured by near-term challenges like rising costs and global competition for a limited number of resources to build and install thousands of turbines over the next decade (Climatewire, Nov. 15).

The pro-wind Biden administration has been a boon for many developers, who had grown skittish during the final days of President Donald Trump’s term, when progress in reviewing offshore wind farms ground to a halt and the sitting president uttered disparaging inaccuracies about the industry — like that noise generated from turbines cause cancer.

But despite the Biden administration’s aggressive policy blueprint for approving the first fleet of wind arrays off the nation’s coast, permitting takes time, a reflection of the pressure on the Interior Department’s small offshore energy agency as it seeks to build up its ranks.

“They’re building the muscle memory to do it, building up their capacity,” said Josh Kaplowitz, vice president of offshore wind at the American Clean Power Association and a former lawyer at Interior advising BOEM’s Office of Renewable Energy Programs. “It’s still a relatively new program.”

Permitting has long been a pinch point for offshore wind in the United States, where currently a two-turbine pilot project off the coast of Virginia is the only one that’s finished construction in federal waters. The five-turbine project near Block Island in Rhode Island is located in state waters.

The largest hurdle to getting projects to construction is BOEM’s completion of an environmental impact statement, or EIS, that consists of thousands of pages detailing a project’s specific impacts on everything from sea turtles and migratory birds to marine life and air quality. Each wind array’s construction and operations plan requires this environmental review, which BOEM says generally takes about two years to complete.

The two wind farms BOEM has advanced through the EIS to approval are Vineyard Wind off the coast of Massachusetts and South Fork Wind, which will serve New York. Both are scheduled to finish construction and start operating next year.

To date, wind developers have filed 17 other construction and operation plans with the bureau. Ten of those have entered the environmental review process. But only three projects have advanced to a draft EIS: proposed arrays off the coasts of Rhode Island, New York and New Jersey.

Most of the construction and operations plans that BOEM is fielding stacked up during the Trump administration, a backlog that helped inspire the Biden administration’s target of clearing 16 wind arrays by 2025.

When the Biden administration took over it was like “a dam that was released,” said Kaplowitz. “BOEM is playing catch-up.”

Since taking office, the Biden administration has marshaled resources to ease the growing logjam of projects, observers acknowledged, perhaps most importantly by working with Congress to direct cash to the bureau to hire dozens of new staff.

That’s been a priority for Amanda Lefton, a former New York state official who was appointed as BOEM director in February 2021 and immediately begin swelling the then-30-employee office of renewable energy programs (Greenwire, May 24).

BOEM has enlarged that crew, expanding to roughly 70 people. It’s also borrowed expertise to meet wind demand from regional offices like the one in the Gulf of Mexico — the bureau’s largest regional office and one historically focused on offshore oil and beach restoration.

Read the full article at E&E News