Getting serious about making a Virginia a major player in the offshore wind energy, the Northam administration has engaged international energy consulting firm BVG Associates. BVG Advisory Director Andy Geissbuehler made his first public appearance in a public listening session in Newport News yesterday on the topic of wind development.
“Everyone knows the U.S. will be a massive offshore wind market, and the U.S. will be very fast in picking up and catching up with some of the current market leaders, and will probably develop to one of the No. 1 markets globally,” said Giessbuehler, as reported by the Daily Press.
The idea of making Virginia an East Coast leader in offshore wind and a center of the supply chain supporting an offshore wind sector, has been a prominent goal of Virginia governors since at least the time of Bob McDonnell. But what was once a lofty aspiration for the distant future is becoming an urgent priority. Other East Coast states are promoting offshore wind, and they, too, want to exploit a first-mover advantage to become the operations center for the offshore wind industry. As the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week:
In Fall River, a former textile hub on the Massachusetts coast, Bristol County economic development director Kenneth Fiola touts waterfront land and a workforce rooted in manufacturing as reasons the city would make a perfect base for the American offshore wind industry.
In Providence, R.I., officials are promoting their port’s experience helping build the country’s first offshore wind farm off Block Island. In Virginia, representatives are selling the advantages of a waterway with no bridges that would ease the transportation of enormous pieces of the building-size wind turbines.
All along the East Coast, politicians and economic development officials are beginning to pitch their communities as potential hubs for the burgeoning U.S. offshore wind industry. Offshore wind developers, which have largely focused on coastal Europe thus far, have plans to build a dozen utility-scale farms off the U.S. side of the Atlantic in coming years, spurring billions in investment and thousands of jobs.
The competition has ratcheted up this year, with leaders in some states, including New York and New Jersey, pushing aggressive wind-energy procurement goals and pledging financial support to develop the necessary infrastructure and workforce.
In Virginia, the big hold-up has been a need to design wind turbines suited to the geological conditions of the seabed off the Virginia coast and capable of withstanding hurricane-force winds. Dominion Energy has proposed building two test turbines offshore as a demonstration project that, hopefully, would prove the viability of a coastal Virginia location. That project has been stalled due to the astronomically high cost per turbine, which the State Corporation Commission could never justify on a cost-per-kilowatt basis alone. But political winds have shifted with the enactment of the Grid Modernization and Security Act of 2018, which declared offshore wind to be in the public interest.
Dominion says that offshore wind could generate as much as 2,000 megawatts of electricity, roughly equivalent in capacity to one-and-a-half modern combined-cycle natural gas plants. Virginia touts its mid-Atlantic location and the presence of an existing ship repair industry as reasons for the wind construction and repair industry to locate in Hampton Roads.
Presumably, Geissbuehler has been hired as an advocate for Virginia’s offshore wind ambitions, although it is not clear from the Daily Press article whether he will be spending most of his time as an economic developer seeking to entice offshore-wind companies to Virginia, as a wind champion to build political and regulatory support within Virginia, or something else entirely.
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