December 7, 2021 — Experts are warning that the challenge of connecting large amounts of offshore wind to an aging onshore grid may be much larger than initially realized.
That’s because offshore wind will need to grow very big, very fast to decarbonize the grid, they say.
The White House has given a big boost to the burgeoning sector with its pledge to facilitate putting 30 gigawatts of offshore wind in the water by 2030 as part of a broader plan to decarbonize the economy by midcentury.
To reach the 2050 target, however, offshore wind would need to swell to 300 GW on the East Coast alone, said Eric Hines, a civil and environmental engineering expert at Tufts University, during an offshore wind panel hosted by Resources for the Future last week.
Hines is not alone in his assessment. While the Biden administration was lauded by industry and activists for the ambitious 30-GW target — which would be a 7,000 percent increase in offshore wind power from today — many academics crunching numbers conclude that the level of emissions cuts called for by Biden would require a lot more power.
A Princeton University study last year estimated that the United States may need to triple its transmission to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, for example.