On Thursday, the White House announced that it will partner with 11 East Coast states to bolster offshore wind energy.
This arrangement, called the Federal-State Offshore Wind Implementation Partnership, will help to reach national climate goals of 30 megawatts of offshore wind energy by 2030. Estimates show this will create 77,000 new jobs, power 10 million homes, and go a long way toward getting the nation to net-zero by 2035.
Wind-powering the East Coast
“The partnership will support efforts to provide Americans with cleaner and cheaper energy, create good-paying jobs, and make historic investments in new American energy supply chains, manufacturing, shipbuilding, and servicing,” the White House said in a statement.
The first step toward realizing this will be in improving the necessary supply chain. This will involve creating the manufacturing capacity to build the necessary parts for offshore wind farms, transporting materials, building supporting infrastructure, and ensuring staff is in place to build and service the wind farms. The Department of Energy will be working with New York and Maryland to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the existing supply chains to see what needs to be done to complete the project.
The participating states are Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island.
While states could endeavor to build offshore wind farms on their own, interstate and federal collaboration enables more resources and a more unified project. This could also see an interconnected system in which different states can help each other.
“If you didn’t have the federal government and the Biden administration playing an active role, you could run the risk of sort of a patchwork,” said New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy. “The federal government, the Biden administration, the president himself is so invested in this and also in coordinating. That’s just going to make this industry stronger, bigger, and all of that faster.”
