Offshore Wind: The Best Energy Investment America Could Make?

Washington is starting to wake up to something that's been obvious to marine scientists for years. The winds blowing off U.S. waters could be a key to a national clean energy and green jobs revolution.

On Tuesday, the federal government awarded five leases to three companies that want to develop wind turbines off the New Jersey and Delaware coasts for the production of renewable energy.

They're the first such leases the Department of Interior has ever issued for the Outer Continental Shelf. If this official statement is any indication, they won't be the last:

"We made the development of offshore wind energy a top priority for Interior. The technology is proven, effective and available and can create new jobs for Americans while reducing our expensive and dangerous dependence on foreign oil."

The declaration comes as the U.S. Congress is in the midst of a debate over a proposal that would create a costly long-distance "transmission highway" to carry land-based wind energy (among other clean and dirty sources) from the Great Plains to the power-hungry cities of the American East.

The massive transmission build-out spells economic opportunity for the wind-rich Midwest. But for the heads of the Eastern seaboard states, it spells something else entirely: a threat to their regional energy security, their climate protection goals and new green jobs.

In a letter sent last month to the Senate and House leaders of both parties, 11 East Coast governors made the case against the cross-country supergrid:

"...it would hinder our efforts to meet regional renewable energy goals with regional resources and would establish financial conditions in our electricity markets that would impede development of the vast wind resources … just off our shores for decades to come."

In 2007, researchers at the University of Delaware and Stanford University released the nation's first empirical analysis of the offshore wind resource off the Mid-Atlantic coast, surveying power possibilities in shallow waters from Massachusetts to North Carolina.

The peer-reviewed study, published in the Geophysical Research Letters (see proof version here), said East Coast winds could deliver a massive 330 GW of average electrical power. That's nearly five times the region's current electricity demand of 73 GW.

The question of course is, how? Is it practical to fully tap into that potential, considering that, to date, no offshore wind project has ever been constructed or even fully permitted off the U.S. coast?

According to Dr. Willet Kempton, professor of marine policy at the University of Delaware and lead author of the analysis, the answer is yes. For starters, "there are no technology barriers" to meet 100 percent of the power needs of the U.S. states from Virginia through Maine with offshore wind, he told SolveClimate.

What are needed are wind turbines – thousands of them.

Specifically, it would take 166,720 wind turbines, each generating up to 5 MW of power, to build out the full resource of 330 GW for the Eastern Seaboard, the report found. Getting to the region’s current demand of roughly 70 GW would require about a fourth as many. That, says Kempton, is doable within two decades.

The region would need 10 turbine factories, each churning out 7 GW of windmill capacity each year. It's not a stretch to think it could happen.