By GREGORY ZELLER //
The Biden Administration has announced an ambitious plan to dramatically increase the use of offshore wind power along the East Coast – and stakeholders of all stripes are celebrating across Long Island.
In a federal reboot, of sorts, designed to energize an alternative-energy industry that floundered under the previous administration, President Joe Biden on Monday announced a government-wide effort targeting 30 gigawatts of offshore East Coast wind-generated juice – enough to power more than 9 million homes – by 2030.
While helping to clean up America’s energy act, the plan will also deliver major economic benefits, according to the president, who predicts massive private infrastructure investments and tens of thousands of new jobs – upwards of 40,000 just among offshore-energy suppliers, with landlocked power distributors and construction interests also jumping on board.
Leading the effort is the U.S. Department of the Interior, which will create a New Wind Energy Area in Atlantic Ocean waters between the Long Island and New Jersey coasts, and the U.S. Department of Energy, which will make available $3 billion in guaranteed low-interest loans, targeting both offshore energy providers and related on-shore equipment suppliers.
Federal officials hailed some much-needed direction from the top; United States Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said Monday that the federal government’s previous approach to offshore wind “looked like a chicken with its head cut off.”
Similar sentiments echoed this week across New York and especially on Long Island, where industry and academia have patiently banked on offshore wind as a socioeconomic ace-in-the-hole. Earlier this year, for instance, Farmingdale State College, Stony Brook University and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority rekindled forward-thinking plans for a $20 million, Island-based offshore wind training institute.
Adrienne Esposito: A “giant leap” for offshore wind.
Adrienne Esposito, executive director of the Farmingdale-based Citizens Campaign for the Environment, called Monday’s announcement “one small step for the Biden Administration and one giant leap to save the planet.”
“These wind areas will allow us to achieve the goal of 9,0000 megawatts of electricity (flowing onto Long Island), enough to meet 30 percent of the state’s needs,” Esposito told Innovate LI. “It creates a ‘windustry’ that includes good-paying jobs in the field for electrical workers, construction workers and financial professionals.
“This paves the way for our future.”
Joe Martens, director of the Albany-based New York Offshore Wind Alliance, called Biden’s offshore ambitions “staggering in their scope and magnitude.”
“[This] demonstrates the administration’s commitment to addressing climate change, job creation and longstanding issues of environmental justice and social equity,” Martens said Monday. “This commitment will trigger billions in investments in New York and up and down the East Coast.”
Both infrastructure investments and jobs creation were on the minds of the two-dozen environmental activists – including Martens and Esposito – who released a joint statement Monday applauding “President Biden’s early, bold commitments” to offshore wind.
President Biden: Multifaceted approach.
The broad coalition of business, community, environmental and labor groups from New York and other states cheered the combination of leasing, permitting, research funding and loan guarantees in the president’s multifaceted strategy, calling it “a solid game plan for confronting the climate crisis” and specifically noting its socioeconomic might.
“Offshore-wind power will create thousands of quality, family-sustaining jobs in the manufacturing, construction, operations and maintenance (phases), and in the development of port facilities and associated infrastructure,” notes the coalition, which also includes New York League of Conservation Voters President Julie Tighe, Long Island Federation of Labor Executive Director Roger Clayman and Renewable Energy Long Island Executive Director Gordian Raacke, among others.
Also celebrating the Biden Administration’s offshore strategy is Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who sparred early and often over energy policy with former President Donald Trump and called the Biden Administration’s 30 gigawatt/2030 plan – which mirrors Cuomo’s own goal of having 70 percent of New York’s electricity come from renewable sources by the end of this decade – “a historic day for the United States.”
“The announcement today … is a tremendous leap forward in tackling global climate change by building back better with clean energy and spurring a thriving green economy,” the governor said Monday. “We thank the administration for immediately removing the barriers we faced the past four years with the federal government and creating a new priority Wind Energy Area.”
