This post is part of a series related to the March 12 Conference on Public Lands and Energy Transitions that was hosted by the George Washington University Law School's Environment and Energy Law Program.
Offshore wind holds huge promise as a renewable electricity source. Using existing turbine technologies, the U.S. potential is 2,058,000 megawatts (MW), enough to generate double the electricity demand of the entire United States in 2015. About 80 percent of that electricity demand is along the coasts, so getting the power to the public could prove easier than transmitting it from wind-rich midwestern states. Utilities from eight states up and down the East Coast from Maine to Virginia have committed to procuring 22,500 MW of offshore wind so far, and wind power appeared poised to take off when the Department of the Interior awarded 11 commercial offshore leases in 2016.
But now, almost four years later, the United States has yet to break ground on a single offshore wind project in federal waters. Yes, one mini-project of 30 megawatts (five turbines) went online in state waters off Block Island, Rhode Island, in December 2016. And yes, Dominion Energy’s Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind pilot project is planning to go forward with 12 megawatts (two turbines) on a site leased by the Virginia Department of Mines, Minerals, and Energy in late 2020 (if not thwarted by COVID-19 supply chain and quarantine problems). But what happened to the ambitious 800-megawatt proposal from Vineyard Wind, which was to be the first large-scale commercial offshore wind farm in U.S. waters?
Vineyard Wind has been facing strong political headwinds, much like Cape Wind before it, which was touted in 2001 to become the first U.S. wind farm until thwarted by 16 years of setbacks. Offshore wind “runs counter to [President Trump’s] attempt to revive fossil fuels in the U.S.,” and approval to go forward with the project in 2019 was delayed. Tellingly, the new schedule for government action calls for the Environmental Impact Statement to be issued 10 days after the November 2020 election.
Such delays may seriously set back the U.S. offshore wind industry, already far behind Europe’s installed offshore wind capacity of more than 18,000 megawatts. But there may be a bright side to the delays.
Developers have begun to recognize that wind projects create wakes, or turbulence, like the wakes behind boats. These wakes can seriously reduce electricity production from adjacent projects. For example, the efficiency of the Nysted wind project in the North Sea dropped 21 percent when the Rødsand II wind project was installed several miles upwind. Another study of wind projects in Texas calculated that reduced generation of about 5 percent from wakes at the downwind project resulted in annual revenue losses of more than $2 million.
In response to increased awareness of wake effects, the United Kingdom, which leads the world with about 7,000 MW of offshore wind capacity, has established a required setback of five kilometers for its offshore leases. Furthermore, according to project developers and managers, there is a push to broaden these wake setback mandates up to 10 kilometers. These buffer zones are essentially moats around a project to protect it from neighboring wind developments. While the moats may protect the investment of a particular wind developer, they render large areas that could be generating electricity into unproductive areas, where there could be energy development but there is none.
U.S. offshore wind development is in its nascence. Unlike onshore wind development, offshore involves a single landowner – the U.S. government. The overall goal of the government should be to maximize production, efficiency, and royalty revenues on federal leases. Could the delay give us more time and incentive to rethink offshore lease requirements? Instead of resorting to defensive mandated moat setbacks, could we use this delay to explore ways that offshore wind developers can address waking issues through more collaborative solutions? The oil and gas realm had to learn over a century how to avoid waste by developing resources through pools or units rather than focusing on what a single landowner might be able to capture. Such pooling or unitization could perhaps help the U.S. reap some advantage from the long delay in developing its large-scale offshore wind energy resources.
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K.K. DuVivier | March 19, 2020
Offshore wind holds huge promise as a renewable electricity source. Using existing turbine technologies, the U.S. potential is 2,058,000 megawatts (MW), enough to generate double the electricity demand of the entire United States in 2015. About 80 percent of that electricity demand is along the coasts, so getting the power to the public could prove easier than transmitting it from wind-rich midwestern states. Utilities from eight states up and down the East Coast from Maine to Virginia have committed to procuring 22,500 MW of offshore wind so far, and wind power appeared poised to take off when the Department of the Interior awarded 11 commercial offshore leases in 2016.
Alexandra Klass | March 18, 2020
Our vast public lands and waters are both a major contributor to the global climate crisis and a potential solution to the problem. The extraction and use of oil and gas resources from public lands and waters produce 20 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. If the public lands were its own nation, it would be the fifth largest global emitter of GHGs. The scale of this problem has been exacerbated by the current administration.
Daniel Farber | March 18, 2020
Now that President Trump has belatedly declared a national emergency, what powers does he have to respond to the coronavirus pandemic? There has been a lot of talk about this on the Internet, some of it off-base. It's important to get the law straight. For instance, there's been talk about whether Trump should impose a national curfew, but I haven't been able to find any legal authority for doing that so far. The legal discussion of this issue is still at an early stage, but here are some of the major sources of power and how they might play out.
Karen Sokol | March 16, 2020
"This report is a catalogue of weather in 2019 made more extreme by climate change, and the human misery that went with it." That is the statement of Brian Hoskins, chair of Imperial College in London's Grantham Institute for Climate Change, about the recently released State of the Climate in 2019 by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the WMO compiles information from scientists all over the world that has been a key driver of international climate law and policymaking. One of the IPCC's reports was similarly dire to that of the WMO's, but not without hope.
Darya Minovi | March 12, 2020
On March 4, I joined community members and advocates from Assateague Coastal Trust, Center for a Livable Future, Environmental Integrity Project, Food and Water Watch, and NAACP to testify in favor of Maryland's House Bill 1312. The bill, introduced by Delegate Vaughn Stewart (D-Montgomery County), would place a moratorium on permits for new or expanding concentrated animal feed operations (CAFOs) in the state. The legislation would apply to "industrial poultry operations," defined as operations that produce 300,000 or more broiler chickens per year. It was introduced with strong support from community members and environmental and public health advocates hoping to pump the brakes on the seemingly unmitigated growth of poultry CAFOs, especially on the Eastern Shore.
Christine Klein, Sandra Zellmer | March 11, 2020
The flood season is upon us once again. Beginning in February, parts of Mississippi and Tennessee were deluged by floods described as "historic," "unprecedented," even "Shakespearean." At the same time, Midwestern farmers are still reeling from the torrential rains of 2019 that destroyed billions of dollars' worth of crops and equipment, while wondering whether their water-ravaged farmland can ever be put back into production. All this while the Houston area continues to recover from three so-called "500-year floods" in as many years, back-to-back in 2015, 2016, and, most notably, Hurricane Harvey in 2017.
Matt Shudtz | March 5, 2020
From the farm fields of California to the low-lying neighborhoods along the shores of the Chesapeake Bay, structural racism and legally sanctioned inequities are combining with the effects of the climate crisis to put people in danger. The danger is manifest in heat stroke suffered by migrant farmworkers and failing sewer systems that back up into homes in formerly redlined neighborhoods. Fortunately, public interest attorneys across the country are attuned to these problems and are finding ways to use the law to force employers and polluters to adapt to the realities of the climate crisis.
John Leshy | March 5, 2020
With the help of the U.S. Congress, the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) has had a long and proud history of tackling pressing challenges through responsible and inclusive management of America's public lands. One might expect it would continue that tradition as climate change has become a major challenge confronting the nation. Not so. In fact, Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt has been doing more than any of his predecessors to promote fossil fuel development on America's public lands, all the while dancing around the issue of whether he has an obligation, or even the legal authority, to address climate change.
Karen Sokol | March 2, 2020
Earlier this year, on the heels of the Earth's hottest decade on record, a coalition of former government officials, fossil fuel companies, car manufacturers, financial companies, and nonprofit organizations renewed their endorsement of a national carbon tax as "the most effective climate solution" (emphasis added). And by "the," it appears that they mean "the only." The catch is that the coalition's legislative plan also calls for preventing the federal government from regulating carbon emissions and from taking any other protective measures "that are no longer necessary upon the enactment of a rising carbon fee." Given the scale and complexity of the planetary emergency that we face, it would certainly be nice if the solution were that simple. But that, of course, is too good to be true.