I should add a question mark to the end of that post title. From the NY Times:
Last fall, five turbines in the waters of Rhode Island — the country’s first offshore farm — began delivering power to the grid. European energy developers like Statoil and Dong Energy are making big investments to bring projects to American waters. Last year in Massachusetts, Gov. Charlie Baker, a Republican, signed into law a mandate that is pushing development forward.
And in New York, after years of stymied progress, the Long Island Power Authority has reached an agreement with Deepwater Wind, which built the Rhode Island turbine array, to drop a much larger farm — 15 turbines capable of running 50,000 average homes — into the ocean about 35 miles from Montauk. If approved by the utility board on Wednesday, the $1 billion installation could become the first of several in a 256-square-mile parcel, with room for as many as 200 turbines, that Deepwater is leasing from the federal government. ...
These projects could also become an important test case in establishing just how far states can go to to pursue their clean energy agendas under the Trump administration. Before putting steel in the water, the project would need federal approvals and policies that are in doubt amid Washington’s changing of the guard.
Wind power has finally become viable for a number of delicately interlaced reasons. It has taken favorable state policies and technological and economic advances to spur the current level of activity, as well as interest among developers and investors, including foreign oil and gas companies that see offshore wind as an important part of their corporate strategies. In Europe, where the offshore wind industry is far ahead of the United States’, costs have plummeted to roughly half of what they were five years ago, said Thomas Brostrom, who runs United States operations for Dong Energy, the Danish oil and gas giant and a leading offshore wind developer.
As the industry has grown, manufacturers have been able to take advantage of economies of scale and cut their prices. At the same time, turbines have grown ever larger, allowing them to capture and produce more energy on the same site. ...
Statoil, the Norwegian fossil-fuel giant, has been aiming to get into the offshore business in the United States for years, and proposed in 2011 to build a farm off the Maine coast using floating platforms it had designed. The company withdrew the project two years later amid uncertainty over changing state policies, eventually deciding to build off the Scottish coast.
Now it is back, having won a 33-round auction to secure a 79,000-acre site south of Jones Beach on Long Island. Statoil beat out several other bidders, including the state’s energy agency, Dong and a subsidiary of Iberdrola, a leading energy company based in Spain. Statoil pledged $42.5 million for the lease, which still awaits final signoffs, far more than the $16 million generated by all earlier offshore wind auctions combined. ...
Officials at the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which approved the Cape Wind site in 2010, have spent years clarifying rules and identifying marine parcels suitable for wind power development in an effort to balance several often-competing concerns. Those include the needs of marine life and of industry, along with those of coastal communities. They also include the demand for economic development and clean energy sources, from states concerned about both job losses and climate change. Since 2013, the agency has conducted six competitive auctions of long-term leases for parcels from New England to Virginia, and in the past week it announced a seventh, for North Carolina, scheduled to take place in March. ...
That momentum may be difficult to slow, even if new federal policies put a stop to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s leasing activities for wind energy, its proponents say. The active leases alone, if developed, are enough to create an industry, they say. And the commitments of states like New York and Massachusetts, and experienced multinational developers, show that the struggle to harness Atlantic breezes is no longer the same as tilting at windmills.
“It is a sign of something that’s inevitable, which is the addition of offshore wind into the energy mix,” said Erik Gordon, a clinical assistant professor at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. “It’s just going to be too appealing. In the end, the economics trump Trump.”
Famous last words?
