Update On Offshore Wind Projects Off The Mid-Atlantic And New England

Offshore wind turbines — those are the magical solution to all our energy problems. The wind is clean and free. And way out in the ocean — where you can barely even see the towers — the wind blows steadily almost all the time. Just put up a few turbines to catch the breezes, and those evil fossil fuels will quickly be banished.

Anyway, that has been the talk for at least three decades. After 30 years of talk, the number of actual functioning wind turbines out in the Atlantic Ocean off the U.S. coast is now exactly seven: five off Block Island (part of Rhode Island), and two off Virginia. Those provide some tiny fraction of 1% of the electricity for the mid-Atlantic states and New England.

But the Biden Administration has much grander plans. According to this May 2021 piece from the Institute for Energy Research, Biden’s “net zero” plans include the construction of “some 30,000 megawatts of new offshore wind capacity by 2030, the equivalent of 1,000 Block Island projects.”

30,000 megawatts. Wow, that’s a lot. Or is it? According to the American Public Power Association, as of February 2023 the U.S. had some 1.3 million megawatts of electricity generation capacity. So the 30,000 MW of new offshore wind would be an increment of something between 2 and 3% to existing nameplate capacity. And since wind turbines only function about 30-40% of the time (optimistically) when averaged over the year, the 30,000 new MW of capacity of offshore wind would really be equivalent to at most 9-12,000 MW of dispatchable generation, so will at best add about 1% to existing capacity, and even that at random times that would require backup to assure reliability.

But is the 30,000 MW of new offshore wind capacity even real? Yes, big subsidy numbers got put into the fraudulently-named “Inflation Reduction Act” of 2022 for the purpose of getting the offshore wind projects built. Lots of offshore wind projects in the mid-Atlantic and New England areas then got put up for bid, and contracts for construction of the turbines were issued. Can we get an update on that? Is anything actually getting built?

For New York, it appears that both in the run-up to, and immediately after enactment of the IRA, the state put a collection of projects up for bid. The agency running this show has the lengthy acronym of NYSERDA (New York State Energy Research and Development Authority). At their website, NYSERDA reports on the status of their efforts. The plan is for some 9,000 MW of offshore wind for New York alone, of which some “4,300 megawatts are under active development.” Here is an excerpt from NYSERDA’s excited narrative on the status on how it’s going:

In July 2022, New York State launched its third competitive solicitation, ORECRFP22-1, to procure at least 2,000 additional megawatts of offshore wind energy for New Yorkers. This solicitation comes on the heels of a record-setting auction by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) for leases in the New York Bight in February 2022. . . . In the State’s second offshore wind procurement, NYSERDA selected two projects for contract negotiation: Empire Wind 2 and Beacon Wind of Equinor Wind US LLC. Together, these projects total nearly 2,500 megawatts, enough to power 1.3 million homes. . . . New York now has five offshore wind projects in active development – the largest offshore wind pipeline in the nation totaling more than 4,300 megawatts. . . .

Here from NYSERDA is a map of where all of these projects will supposedly be built:

The information on that web page was current as of about last March. But since then things have gone rapidly south. ReNews.biz has an update dated September 1:

The developers of four offshore wind farms in New York are seeking average price rises of almost 50% on their offtake agreements. . . . The projects involved are Orsted and Eversource’s 924MW Sunrise Wind project, along with Equinor and bp’s 816MW Empire Wind 1, 1260MW Empire Wind 2 and 1230MW Beacon Wind. Sunrise Wind previously agreed a price of $110.37 per MWh, and is now seeking a $139.99 price instead, a 27% increase, according to NYSERDA. Empire Wind 1 requested increasing its strike price from $118.38 to $159.64, a 35% increase, while Empire Wind 2 asked for its $107.50 original price to be increased to $177.84, a 66% increase. Meanwhile, Beacon Wind wants its $118.00 previously agreed price ramped up to $190.82, 62% more. The three Equinor and bp projects combined have an average price rise of 55%.

Add up the capacity figures there, and it looks like of the 4,300 MW that NYSERDA was bragging about, the developers of at least 3,300 MW are about to back out without massive price increases. By the way, natural gas plants can typically sell electricity to the grid at around $50/MWh, or $0.05/kWh. The prices being talked about here for the offshore wind are in the range of triple to quadruple, and that’s before getting to the costs of extra transmission, let alone energy storage to back up the intermittency.

And up the coast in New England, the exact same thing is happening even as we speak. Robert Bryce has an update on his Substack post from yesterday, October 4. The headline is “Wind Blows.” Here is the lede:

The only thing dumber than onshore wind energy is offshore wind energy. The good news for ratepayers, taxpayers, birds, bats, landscapes, viewsheds, and the critically endangered North Atlantic Right Whale, is that both sectors are getting hammered by market forces that make their projects uneconomic.

And then there is a litany of essentially all the developers paying massive cancellation fees to walk away from what seems like every existing contract for offshore wind development in New England:

On Monday, Avangrid, a subsidiary of the Spanish utility Iberdrola,  announced that it was abandoning the 804-megawatt Park City Wind project offshore Connecticut. . . . In August, Shell and Ocean Winds North America agreed to pay $60 million to cancel contracts to sell power to Massachusetts from the proposed 2,400-megawatt SouthCoast Wind project. In July, Avangrid agreed to pay $48 million to cancel its contract with Massachusetts to sell power from the proposed 1,200-megawatt Commonwealth Wind project. Also in July, Rhode Island Energy announced it was canceling a power purchase agreement with Ørsted and Eversource on the 884-megawatt Revolution Wind project. . . .

Will any of these wildly uneconomic offshore wind projects actually ever get built? Let’s hope not.