“There’s no procedure for this. They’re making it up as they go along”. That quote, by the attorney of US Wind, David Newman, in a Baltimore courtroom, exemplifies the larger problem facing the engineering industry regarding U.S. offshore wind: projects that appear to be technically and administrationally, yet officially, approved, may still be kicked back into the workflow, leaving developers, suppliers, and grid planners with the new target of “permitted”.
The most recent flash point is a federal motion that the “US Wind remains committed to building our 1,700 MW offshore wind project, one of the largest new electricity projects in the entire region. After many years of analysis, several federal agencies issued final permits to the project. We intend to vigorously defend those permits in federal court, and we are confident that the court will uphold their validity and prevent any adverse action against them”.
US Wind has indicated that it would protect the approvals. The US Wind is still determined to develop our 1,700 MW offshore wind project, which is one of the largest new projects in the whole region in terms of electricity production. Several federal agencies issued final permits to the project after an extended time of analysis. The company said in a statement included in the main filing narrative that it would vehemently challenge those permits in federal court and that the court would invalidate such any adverse action against them.
The key to the dispute in Maryland is the administrative rationale of a “remand with vacatur” a procedure that can revisit the decision-making of the agency without necessarily a full merits ruling on each underlying technical matter at the point of entry. In the US Wind case, the federal defendants are Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and National Marine Fisheries Service where the case was initially filed by the mayor and council of the city of Ocean City. The essence of the objection of the developer is operational rather than legal: the uncertainty in the long term may cease final engineering packages, procurement and port scheduling despite the paperwork indicating that construction is possible.
In a similar decision Judge Stephanie A. Gallagher emphasized that difference between business risk and legal harm. She wrote that US Wind has the right to proceed with the development of the project and the approved COP that is still valid. It just has decided in business not to do so in the face of the political headwinds it sees. The judge as well indicated that the court required the administrative record prior to making a determination whether remand or vacatur is necessary but it is a method of stretching schedules even when physical work is not ordered to cease.
To the engineer and project managers, the practical implication is that “notice to proceed” is as bankable as turbine foundations, export cables and substations. In its project, US Wind incorporates export infrastructure of an onshore component which has been controversially discussed on the local level, such as a substation and a high-voltage cable route. The implications of the supply chain are wider as “offshore” windows of construction, installation ships, and interconnection milestones are not always flexible.
The case in Maryland is not an exception. The same has been anticipated with two Massachusetts projects, New England Wind, by Avangrid, and SouthCoast Wind by Ocean Winds, both of which have had approvals of Construction and Operations Plan. The similar element here is not that a new bolt pattern has been found or a new geotechnical risk has been determined but rather that federal agencies are open to reconsidering the balance of fisheries, navigation and other ocean activities in previous reviews.
Within the framework of offshore wind, the said questions are contained within a stratified jurisdictional system. States control the governing nearshore and landfall components, and most of the location of the siting area on the outer continental shelf is controlled by the federal government via BOEM leasing and permitting. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 defined the powers of Interior to issue offshore rights to renewable energy development and the Coastal Zone Management Act provided the states with the consistency-review role of the impact on its coastal zones. Technically a project may be offshore and still have its most complicated onshore interconnection segment to be its constraint.
Industry groups have pointed to the consumer-level impacts of postponing the introduction of large new sources of generation. The energy source is a generational opportunity in American energy, which is almost entirely supported by nearly 70 percent of the Maryland residents. Families simply cannot afford to choose and filter what kind of domestic energy is being online to satisfy increased demand and prices- we want it all. Ensuring that every community benefits through the promotion of a shovel-ready project that will supply 600,000 Maryland households with reliable and affordable power, Oceantic Network CEO Liz Burdock made the comments that were distributed along with the permitting controversy.
The grid operators have also raised such concerns in the areas where offshore wind is likely to play an important role in seasonal reliability. In New England, ISO New England identified that canceling or delaying near complete projects would incur greater costs and risk of unreliability and said that winter is the time of year where offshore wind generation is generally most abundant and other fuels can be limiting. The operator further added that uncertain risk to capital-intensive facilities near completion would also dampen future investment and compromise reliability planning.
Outside of courts and grid forecasts, the argument has also taken the issue of making certain technical assertions high on the agenda of agencies that justify additional scrutiny. It has been publicly explained by Interior that some delays have been caused by turbine related radar interference called clutter, and that very reflective towers and rotating blades create phantom targets and hides the genuine ones. The interior has cited a department of energy report that indicated that an increase in false-alarm threshold of a radar can decrease clutter but this may also result in an increase of the risk of missing real targets.
Consequentially, the most significant variable is not the reality of offshore wind to real design and environmental constraints-it does- but it is whether project teams can make the assumption that the permitting baseline will last long enough to finish financing, detailed design, procurement, and installation. An even bigger infrastructure lesson was formulated by Dartmouth professor Elizabeth Wilson, who writes about the development of offshore wind: The political and regulatory instability that we experience today is not suited to large-scale projects that require years to develop and cost billions of dollars to build.
With such cases as they keep on increasing, schedule certainty may prove to be the most difficult engineering challenge in the offshore wind sector: the capacity to fix an installation plan, coordinate it with the manufacturing lead time, and provide energy on a schedule that can be actually relied upon by the grid.
