Uncertainty over the future of the US offshore wind industry remains a significant concern for state officials on the east coast as well as participants in the region's renewable energy certificate (REC) markets.
Should projects currently in the pipeline fail to move forward, or are delayed significantly, states in the region may fall behind their climate policy goals and REC markets will lose a large source of future supply.
"Offshore wind is a critical part of that," said Jonathan Schrag, deputy climate chief for Massachusetts governor Maura Healey said on Tuesday at the Environmental Markets Association's annual meeting in Boston.
The administration of President Donald Trump has created choppy waters for the industry by ordering some projects to stop construction work, threatening [to revoke permits](2736978) for others and otherwise rewriting regulations to make them less friendly to renewable energy projects.
As a result, the ability of many projects to achieve their previously expected completion dates is up in the air.
"It's just a huge question mark as to what offshore wind is going to look like long-term", said Andrew Kinross, director at consultant Power Advisory. "Is it going to come back, or is there going to be complete market failure?"
In New England, even without the Trump administration's opposition to offshore wind, projects already are falling behind their expected timelines
"A couple years ago, we thought we'd be seeing 1,500MW of offshore wind by now," said Bob Grace president of Sustainable Energy Advantage, a consultant focused on the northeast markets.
Grace said he still expects that capacity to come on line, as it is all under construction. But it will be "staggered within the next year to year and a half."
If offshore wind does not get built as expected, New England states may have to look elsewhere for additional clean energy supplies. That could include renewables in northern Maine and in Quebec. The states may even have to consider offshore wind from the Canadian Maritimes.
"Transmission, again, is the issue there. It's a long transmission run, but with the state climate goals, they're probably going to need it," Grace said.
For the PJM region, the only project likely to achieve operations as expected is Dominion Energy's Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project, given the "political weight" behind it in the state, according to Kinross. Dominion expects to finish the project sometime late next year.
"But other than that, we have the next offshore wind project coming on line sometime in the early 2030s," he said.
