It’s too soon to say for sure if President Joe Biden’s new strategy to accelerate work on offshore wind farms will lead to any large, energy-producing turbines off South Carolina’s coast.
Still, the U.S. Department of Interior’s recently announced plan to hold lease sales by 2025 for sites along the Atlantic coast, from Maine to South Carolina, as well as California, Oregon and the Gulf of Mexico is a necessary step toward a future where we get more of our power from renewable sources.
In the past, we have joined coastal mayors, the environmental community and others in voicing strong opposition toward any federal offshore leases for oil and gas drilling, but wind power is a different story and could be a welcome addition. The environmental risks from large new turbines are far less than those from oil exploration and drilling.
Eddy Moore, energy and climate program director with the Coastal Conservation League, puts it this way: “Our position is if we’re going to lease land owned by all of us offshore for energy production, it should be clean energy production. The environmental impacts from that are cleaner and much smaller.”
It’s laudable that the Biden administration is moving this quickly on offshore wind farm leases, but the initial activity is expected to occur further north on the Atlantic coast, where some states have renewable energy requirements that are fueling more work on offshore wind. (One of the earliest offshore wind projects, five giant turbines off Block Island, R.I., began operating about five years ago; of the more than 69,000 wind turbines built in the United States since 1980, fewer than 10 are offshore, according to a federal database.)
Mr. Biden’s plan would develop up to seven major offshore wind farms on the East and West coasts and in the Gulf of Mexico that could generate 30 gigawatts of offshore wind energy by 2030, enough to power more than 10 million homes. The Interior Department also is working with other federal agencies on a related strategy to increase renewable energy production on public lands. The plan reverses the bizarre decision in late 2020 by Mr. Biden’s predecessor to couple a temporary moratorium on oil exploration and drilling off South Carolina’s coast with a ban on new offshore leases for wind farms.
The cost-benefit calculations for wind power off South Carolina’s coast will continue to evolve, and federal leases are a necessary step along the way — one more variable to plug into the much larger equation. Our state’s utilities and utility regulators should keep crunching the numbers as we try to transition away from fossil fuels and toward more renewables to provide our power.
Meanwhile, South Carolina should ensure its other infrastructure is ready should offshore wind prove viable. Fortunately, we appear to have a good head start: The nation’s largest wind turbine testing facility, the Dominion Energy Innovation Center, sits in a warehouse near old Navy docks along the Cooper River, a strategic site for potentially shipping massive equipment offshore.
Figuring out whether an offshore wind farm makes sense involves a complicated set of considerations, such as existing wind patterns, the height of the turbine or “hub” (taller turbines capture more and often stronger winds) and their proximity to shore. Technological advances with turbines, solar energy and battery life ultimately will decide if offshore wind here makes sense.
“Different things are related to each other in nonlinear ways,” Mr. Moore notes. “Leaving wind energy aside, if we don’t properly evaluate the contributions batteries can make to the grid here, we’re not in a position to maximize the potential for offshore wind.”
So it’s complicated, but with leases figuratively and literally on the horizon, South Carolina should consider offshore wind power among its renewable options as it plans for a better, cleaner mix of generating electricity in the years to come.
