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America’s struggling grid Finally got some major upgrades.Last week, the Biden administration Announce Among other efforts, the plan aims to bring more clean energy online and install more high-voltage transmission cables across the country to get electricity where it’s needed.
On the surface, the plan only appears to be building on foundations laid by Biden. sign Bipartisan infrastructure law passed in November. Part of the framework, released last week, focuses on the kind of details that might leave you speechless, such as how to improve the efficiency of reviewing clean energy projects on public lands, and vague references to supporting clean energy expansion in rural areas. But the real concern is Biden’s offshore wind target is an important source of energy for regions like the northeastern U.S. that lack the space and ample sunlight that solar energy relies on. It is here that the new plan goes from mundane to ambitious, and it could be an indicator of how the government intends to tackle issues related to climate change, energy and jobs at the same time.
Offshore wind power works similar to how onshore wind turbines work (the wind turns the turbine blades around the rotor, which in turn drives the generator to generate electricity)—only offshore turbines are rooted on the seafloor dozens of miles from shore, where they can capture Strong sea breeze. These winds are plentiful in the North Atlantic, which is why the Biden administration has focused its initial offshore wind efforts there.
As of today, there are only seven offshore wind turbines in the U.S. — five of which are in wind farm closed Block Island, Rhode Island, and two others were tested in Virginia.But on February 23, the federal government will auction Offshore wind power is leased to utilities or offshore wind energy developers in a marine area called New York Bay off the coast of New York and New Jersey. Holders of these leases will be able to build wind farms in the area that generate up to 7 GW of energy – enough to power about 2 million homes – which will require 600 to 700 Turbine.
“Offshore wind in the Western Hemisphere has never seen anything like this,” Mike Jacobs, senior energy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told Recode.
Offshore wind energy has historically been the scope of Europe, and Europe has built The installed capacity of offshore wind over the past few decades has been 25 GW.Upcoming 7 GW lease auction brings renewable generation to the Northeast in a meaningful way, just the first of many: Biden administration says it intends to scale up offshore wind 30 GW by 2030. While that’s still a fraction of the roughly 1,000 gigawatts Americans use each year, it’s still a sizable contribution that will help the country transition away from coal- or natural-gas-fueled power plants.
Importantly, Biden’s plan goes beyond increasing the production of clean energy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; it also opens the door to an economy built around clean energy. Those 600 or 700 wind turbines will require people to manufacture the turbine components, ship them out to sea, and maintain them after installation. To achieve this, the White House and the Department of Transportation aim to create nearly 80,000 offshore wind-related jobs by 2030 by investing in ports on the East Coast — some as far away as Albany, New York, where turbine components will be shipped Follow the Hudson River to New York Bay.
“The government seems to understand that energy is at the heart of a complex issue,” said Alexandra von Meier, director of the company’s grid projects. California Institute of Energy and Environment at the University of California, Berkeley. “It’s about people’s well-being and jobs.”
It’s also a smart political move: tying the fate of 80,000 jobs (nearly double The country’s current number of coal jobs) and offshore wind could isolate the plan from scenarios such as a Republican victory in 2024. Still, Biden’s plan could fall short of the results of the upcoming election. While the lease sale will take place in February, the permitting process alone could take up to three years, after which it will take two years to build the turbines. That’s more than enough for a climate-change-denying interior minister with different political goals to take over and sabotage plans.
Offshore wind is not without its critics.In New England, local fishermen join forces In December with an oil industry lobby group against Vineyard Wind, a proposed 84-turbine wind farm in the waters off Cape Cod, Massachusetts; lawsuit filed by the fishery is still pending in court. Turbine, fisherman says, may have a negative impact on marine life. They are also concerned that the turbine towers could interfere with radar, and the no-navigation safety zone near the turbines could affect their ability to reach fishing areas.Long-term effects of wind turbines on marine life remain unclear, but learn Research in the European North Sea has shown that turbine bases could serve as artificial reefs for animals such as mussels.At the end of last year, the Department of Energy Award The results of a $7.5 million Duke University grant to study the effects of offshore wind on marine life should provide a more complete picture of how turbines affect fisheries.Meanwhile, the Federal Ocean Energy Administration is looking for a solution, and here’s why Sales Notice New York Bay includes provisions designed to help fishermen, such as a 2.8-mile-wide crossing for fishing boats.
The challenges don’t end there: Even if wind turbines do get built, and even if their potential impact on marine life is minimized, the energy they generate must have a place to go. Transmission lines — those high-voltage cables you see hanging on steel stanchions across large swathes of the country — are often built by regional transmission organizations, and Jacobs said there may not be enough transmission lines to carry these new turbines. of all energy.
This is exactly the problem Germany faces in 2020, when Insufficient transmission capacity In northern Germany, this means that the region has to send some of its wind energy to neighboring countries. “They had a lot of offshore wind reaching the beach,” Jacobs said. “Then the German utility industry said, ‘Oh, we’re not really ready for this.'”
The Biden administration appears to want to avoid a similar situation in the United States. That’s why the bipartisan infrastructure law includes funding for transmission lines, and the administration announced that the Department of Energy is launching an initiative called “Building a Better Grid,” which will serve as a central planning agency for improving the grid. But it’s unclear whether that kind of transmission construction will happen when offshore wind is up and running in New York Bay — and the government has made no mention of distribution lines or the low-voltage lines that power homes and businesses. These are typically built in the U.S. by local utilities, and they’re usually only replaced when they’re completely unusable, explained Kerry Baker, an assistant professor of engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder.
“You can have all the clean energy and all the high-voltage lines you want,” Baker told Recode by email, “but without a resilient distribution grid, we’ll still experience life-threatening outages as extreme weather events increase.”
Still, Von Meyer remains optimistic. Combining green energy with jobs and new transmission lines that can better address climate change is an exciting first step, she said. The Biden administration “has understood that there is a real triple need to address climate, address resilience, and address equity. I think they’ve understood that this is an opportunity to address all three with clean energy.”
This story was first published in the Recode newsletter. register here So you won’t miss the next one!
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