Here is another attempt to counter the one-sided negative description of offshore wind we’ve seen on this board lately.
Over the past five years, offshore wind has been a catalyst for building and retrofitting more than 40 specialty vessels at American shipyards, with yet another 20 already in the queue. These vessels — from service operation vessels (SOVs) and mighty heavy-lift installation vessels to crew transfer vessels and cable-lay barges — are designed to operate under the Jones Act, ensuring they are built in America, by American workers, and with American Steel. America’s Offshore Wind Fleet: Reigniting Domestic Shipbuilding - Oceantic Network
That’s about $2.5 Billion dollars invested in American ship building.
Creating a domestic supply chain for offshore wind would be a significant investment in US infrastructure.
If all planned projects are allowed to move forward, the offshore wind industry is projected to invest $65 billion in projects by 2030 which will support 56,000 US jobs. America’s Offshore Wind Energy Industry Facts | ACP
That’s about 50,000 high paying jobs in manufacturing. That’s about the same number of people currently working in coal mining. Is there anyone who would rather do coal mining?
None of the above is about producing electricity. It’s “Incidentals.”
incidental | ˌinsəˈden(t)l |
adjective
1 accompanying but not a major part of something
• occurring by chance in connection with something else: the incidental catch of dolphins in the pursuit of tuna.
2 (incidental to) [predicative] liable to happen as a consequence of (an activity): the ordinary risks incidental to a fireman’s job.
When I read about a project that will employ 1,000 people, that says nothing about the project’s purpose but it’s good political rhetoric.
President Trump has sought to halt the construction of five giant wind farms off the coasts of Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey and Rhode Island — all states run by Democrats.
But there is one East Coast wind farm that has so far escaped the administration’s ire: a $10.8 billion project under construction off the shores of Virginia, where Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, has been its champion.
Mr. Youngkin has quietly pushed back against Mr. Trump’s war on wind energy. A supporter of the president, the governor has privately urged the Trump administration not to target the project known as Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, according to four people briefed on the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.
Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind is about 60 percent complete, according to Dominion Energy, the utility behind the project. Once finished, the wind farm would be the nation’s largest, consisting of 176 turbines that could generate about 2.6 gigawatts of electricity, or enough to power up to 660,000 homes. It is on track to be up and running next year.
Demand for electricity in Virginia is currently growing at its fastest pace since World War II, in large part because of a boom in construction of data centers to power artificial intelligence. Northern Virginia is already home to one of the largest concentrations of data centers in the world, and Dominion has estimated that the state’s electricity use could double over the next 15 years.