The Trump administration is canceling plans to use large areas of federal waters for new offshore wind development — the latest step to suppress the industry in the United States.

More than 3.5 million acres had been designated wind energy areas, as offshore locations deemed most suitable for development. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is now rescinding all designated wind energy areas in federal waters, announcing on Wednesday an end to setting aside large areas for “speculative wind development.”

Offshore wind lease sales were anticipated off the coasts of Texas, Louisiana, Maine, New York, California and Oregon, as well as in the central Atlantic. The Biden administration last year had announced a five-year schedule to lease federal offshore tracts for wind energy production.

Trump began reversing the country’s energy policies after taking office in January. A series of executive orders took aim at increasing oil, gas and coal production. Another early executive order temporarily halted offshore wind lease sales in federal waters and paused the issuance of approvals, permits and loans for all wind projects.

The bureau said it was acting in accordance with Trump’s action and an order by his interior secretary this week to end any preferential treatment toward wind and solar facilities, which were described as unreliable, foreign-controlled energy sources.

Robin Shaffer, president of Protect Our Coast NJ, applauded the administration for its actions and said they were long overdue. Opponents of offshore wind projects are particularly vocal and organized in New Jersey.

“It’s hard to believe these projects ever got this far because of the immensity, scale, scope and expense, compared to relatively cheap and reliable forms of onshore power,” he said Thursday. “We’re nearly there, but we haven’t reached the finish line yet.”

The Sierra Club said the administration’s “relentless obstruction of wind energy” shows it does not care about creating affordable, reliable energy for everyday Americans.

“No matter how much they want to bolster their buddies in the dirty fossil fuel industry, we will continue to push for the cleaner, healthier, and greener future we deserve,” Xavier Boatright, Sierra Club’s deputy legislative director for clean energy and electrification, stated.

Attorneys general from 17 states and the District of Columbia are suing in federal court to challenge Trump’s executive order halting leasing and permitting for wind energy projects. His administration had also halted work on a major offshore wind project for New York but allowed it to resume in May.

The nation’s first commercial-scale offshore wind farm, a 12-turbine facility called South Fork, opened last year east of Montauk Point, New York.

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By JENNIFER McDERMOTT
Associated Press

For the first time in the United States, turbines are sending electricity to the grid from the sites of two large offshore wind farms.

The joint owners of the Vineyard Wind project, Avangrid and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, announced Wednesday the first electricity from one turbine at what will be a 62-turbine wind farm 15 miles off the coast of Massachusetts.

Five turbines are installed there. One turbine delivered about 5 megawatts of power to the Massachusetts grid on Wednesday. The other four are undergoing testing and should be operating early this year.

Danish wind energy developer Ørsted and the utility Eversource announced last month that their first turbine was sending electricity from what will be a 12-turbine wind farm, South Fork Wind, 35 miles east of Montauk Point, New York. Now, a total of five turbines have been installed there too.

Avangrid CEO Pedro Azagra said 2023 was a historic year for offshore wind with “steel in the water and people at work, and today, we begin a new chapter and welcome 2024 by delivering the first clean offshore wind power to the grid in Massachusetts.” Avangrid is an energy company headquartered in Orange, Connecticut. Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners is a large fund manager and global leader in renewable energy investments.

“We’ve arrived at a watershed moment for climate action in the U.S., and a dawn for the American offshore wind industry,” Azagra said in a statement Wednesday.

Moving away from fossil fuels

Nearly 200 countries agreed last month at to move away from planet-warming fossil fuels — the first time they’ve made that crucial pledge in decades of U.N. climate talks. The deal calls for tripling the use of renewable energy, and offshore wind will be crucial to meeting that target.

Large offshore wind farms have been making electricity for three decades in Europe, and more recently in Asia. The United States has struggled to launch the industry here.

Vineyard Wind was conceived as a way to do just that, and prove the industry wasn’t dead in the United States at at time when many people thought it was.

The first U.S. offshore wind farm was supposed to be a project off the coast of Massachusetts known as Cape Wind. The application was submitted to the federal government in 2001. It failed after years of local opposition and litigation. Turbines began spinning off Rhode Island’s Block Island in 2016. But with just five of them, it’s not a commercial-scale wind farm.

Vineyard Wind submitted state and federal project plans to build an offshore wind farm in 2017. Massachusetts had committed to offshore wind by requiring its utilities to solicit proposals for up to 1,600 megawatts of offshore wind power by 2027.

Vineyard Wind would be significantly farther offshore than Cape Wind and the first utility-scale wind power development in federal waters.

In what might have been a fatal blow, federal regulators delayed Vineyard Wind by holding off on issuing a key environmental impact statement in 2019. Massachusetts Democratic Rep. William Keating said at the time the Trump administration was trying to stymie the renewable energy project just as it was coming to fruition.

The Biden administration signed off on it in 2021. Construction began onshore in Barnstable, Massachusetts. This spring, massive tower sections from Portugal arrived at the Port of New Bedford to be assembled out on the water.

New Bedford Mayor Jon Mitchell said Wednesday’s announcement is a “great way to kick off 2024.”

The 800-megawatt wind farm will power more than 400,000 homes and businesses in Massachusetts. Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey said this is clean, affordable energy made possible by the many advocates, public servants, union workers and business leaders who worked for decades to accomplish this achievement.

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By ISABELLA O’MALLEY, JENNIFER McDERMOTT and ALEXA ST. JOHN
Associated Press

Led by new solar power, the world added renewable energy at breakneck speed in 2023, a trend that if amplified will help Earth turn away from fossil fuels and prevent severe warming and its effects.

Clean energy is often now the least expensive, explaining some of the growth. Nations also adopted policies that support renewables, some citing energy security concerns, according to the International Energy Agency. These factors countered high interest rates and persistent challenges in getting materials and components in many places.

The IEA projected that more than 440 gigawatts of renewable energy would be added in 2023, more than the entire installed power capacity of Germany and Spain together.

Here’s a look at the year in solar, wind and batteries.

ANOTHER BANNER YEAR FOR SOLAR

China, Europe, and the U.S. each set solar installation records for a single year, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency.

China’s additions dwarfed those of all other countries, at somewhere between 180 and 230 gigawatts, depending on how end-of-the-year projects turn out. Europe added 58 gigawatts.

Solar is now the cheapest form of electricity in a majority of countries. Solar panel prices fell a whopping 40 percent to 53 percent in Europe between December 2022 and November 2023 and are now at record lows.

“Particularly in Europe, it’s been really at breakneck speed of scaling up the deployment,” said Michael Taylor, senior analyst at IRENA.

When the final numbers for 2023 are in, solar energy is expected to surpass hydropower in total capacity globally, but for actual electricity produced, hydropower will still make more clean power for some time because it can produce around the clock.

In the United States, California continues to have the most solar energy, followed by Texas, Florida, North Carolina, and Arizona.

Both state and federal incentives had a large influence on U.S. solar growth, said Daniel Bresette, president of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, a non-profit education and policy organization.

Despite solar’s success in 2023, there are hurdles. There has been a shortage of transformers, Bresette said, while interest rates have risen.

In the U.S., solar manufacturing grew as well. “We have seen the impact of the Inflation Reduction Act in terms of fueling investments … more than 60 solar manufacturing facilities were announced over the past year,” said Abigail Ross Hopper, president and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association.

CHALLENGES FOR WIND ENERGY

By the end of 2023, the world will have added enough wind energy to power nearly 80 million homes, making it a record year.

As with solar, most of the growth, or more than 58 gigawatts, was added in China, according to research from Wood Mackenzie. China is on track to surpass its ambitious 2030 target of 1,200 gigawatts of utility-scale solar and wind power capacity five years ahead of schedule if planned projects are all built, the Global Energy Monitor said.

China was one of the few growing markets this year for wind, the Global Wind Energy Council said. Faster permitting and other improvements in key markets such as Germany and India also helped add more wind energy. But installations were down in Europe by 6 percent year-over-year, Wood Mackenzie said.

Short-term challenges such as high inflation, rising interest rates and increased costs of building materials forced some ocean wind developers to renegotiate or even cancel project contracts, and some land-based wind developers to delay projects to 2024 or 2025.

The economic headwinds came at a difficult time for the nascent U.S. offshore wind industry as it tries to launch the nation’s first commercial-scale offshore wind farms. Construction began on two this year. Both aim to open early in 2024 and one of the sites is already sending electricity to the U.S. grid. Large offshore wind farms have been making electricity for three decades in Europe, and more recently in Asia.

After years of record growth, the industry group American Clean Power expects less land-based wind to be added in the United States by year’s end, about enough to power 2.7 million to 3 million homes. The group says developers are taking advantage of new tax credits passed last year in the Inflation Reduction Act, but it takes years to bring the projects online. There has been $383 billion in announced clean energy investments since passage of the IRA, it said.

“We’re talking about 2023 essentially as a lower performance year, but in the grand scheme of things, 8 to 9 gigawatts is still a number to get excited about. It’s a lot of new clean energy that’s being added to the grid,” said John Hensley, ACP’s vice president for research and analytics.

Globally the wind buildout was slower this year as well. The top three markets this year are still China, the United States and Germany for wind energy produced on land, and China, the United Kingdom and Germany for offshore.

The analysts are predicting that the global industry will rebound next year and make nearly 12 percent more wind energy available worldwide.

In June, the industry celebrated passing 1 terawatt of installed wind energy worldwide. It took more than 40 years to reach that milestone, but it could take less than seven years for the second terawatt, at the pace the industry is on now.

MASSIVE YEAR FOR BATTERIES

Amid an ongoing push to make transportation less damaging to the climate, the electric vehicle trend accelerated globally in 2023, with one in five cars sold this year expected to be electric, according to the International Energy Agency. That meant it also turned out to be another banner year for batteries.

More than $43.4 billion has been spent on battery manufacturing and battery recycling just in the U.S. this year, thanks largely to the Inflation Reduction Act, according to Atlas Public Policy. This puts the U.S. on a more level playing field with Europe, but still behind battery powerhouse China.

As for large battery factories, called gigafactories, the U.S. and Europe each had 38 in the works by late November, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. But China had 295 in the works.

The industry continued to explore different ways of making batteries without depending so much on harmful materials, as well as ways of making components more sustainable, and the battery recycling industry made headway, experts said.

The cost of key battery raw materials, including lithium, also dropped significantly, Benchmark senior analyst Evan Hartley said.

“The battery cost is now on that trajectory that most Americans will be able to afford an EV,” said Paul Braun, a University of Illinois professor of materials science and engineering.

2023 wasn’t an easy journey. The U.S. industry, in particular navigated several headwinds. A massive Panasonic battery facility in Kansas had energy challenges. Toyota needs to shore up a talent pool for its site in North Carolina. Health and safety violations were found at a joint venture plant between General Motors Co. and LG Energy Solution in Ohio. The list goes on.

Regardless of the region, roadblocks remain in minerals, responsible supply chains, and the buildout of charging infrastructure. “That’s going to be the next agenda item,” John Eichberger, executive director of the Transportation Energy Institute.

But experts are optimistic that battery growth across the globe will continue.

“The story of batteries in the U.S. in small is the story of batteries globally in 2023 at large,” said Daan Walter, principal in the strategy team at the Rocky Mountain Institute, a sustainability research group, “and how momentous this shift in 2023 has been.”

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By GILLIAN FLACCUS
Associated Press

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — Tuesday marked the first-ever U.S. auction of leases to develop commercial-scale floating wind farms, in the deep waters off the West Coast.

The live, online auction for the five leases — three off California’s central coast and two off its northern coast — has attracted strong interest and 43 companies from around the world are approved to bid. The wind turbines will float roughly 25 miles offshore.

The growth of offshore wind comes as climate change intensifies and need for clean energy grows. It also is getting cheaper. The cost of developing offshore wind has dropped 60 percent since 2010 according to a July report by the International Renewable Energy Agency. It declined 13 percent in 2021 alone.

Offshore wind is well established in the U.K. and some other countries but is just beginning to ramp up off America’s coasts, and this is the nation’s first foray into floating wind turbines.

Auctions so far have been for those anchored to the seafloor.

Europe has some floating offshore wind — a project in the North Sea has been operating since 2017 — but the potential for the technology is huge in areas of strong wind off America’s coasts, said Josh Kaplowitz, vice president of offshore wind at the American Clean Power Association.

“We know that this works. We know that this can provide a huge slice of our our electricity needs, and if we’re going to solve the climate crisis we need to put as many clean electrons online as we can, particularly given increases in load demand with electric vehicles,” he said. “We can reach our greenhouse gas goals only with offshore wind as part of the puzzle.”

Similar auctions are in the works off Oregon’s coast next year and in the Gulf of Maine in 2024.

President Joe Biden set a goal of deploying 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030 using traditional technology that secures wind turbines to the ocean floor, enough to power 10 million homes. Then the administration announced plans in September to develop floating platforms that could vastly expand offshore wind in the United States.

The nation’s first offshore wind farm opened off the coast of Rhode Island in late 2016, allowing residents of small Block Island to shut off five diesel generators. Wind advocates took notice, but with five turbines, it’s not commercial scale.

Globally, as of 2021, there were only 123 megawatts of floating offshore wind operating, but that number is projected to increase to nearly 19 gigawatts — 150 times more — by 2030, according to a report last week by Offshore Wind California.

The California sale is designed to promote a domestic supply chain and create union jobs. Bidders can convert part of their bids into credits that benefit those affected by the wind development — local communities, tribes and commercial fishermen.

As envisioned, the turbines — possibly nearly as tall as the Eiffel Tower — will float on giant triangular platforms roughly the size of a small city block or buoyant cylinders with cables anchoring them underwater. They’ll each have three blades longer than the distance from home plate to the outfield on a baseball diamond, and will need to be assembled onshore and towed, upright, to their open-ocean destination.

Modern tall turbines, whether on or offshore, can produce more than 20 times more electricity than shorter machines, say, from the early 1990s.

As for visibility, “in absolutely perfect conditions, crystal clear on the best days, at the highest point, you might be able to see small dots on the horizon,” said Larry Oetker, executive director of the Humboldt Bay Harbor, Conservation and Recreation District, which has been preparing its deep-water port for the projects.

Offshore wind is a good complement to solar energy, which shuts down at night. Winds far out to sea are stronger and more sustained and also pick up in the evening, just when solar is going offline yet demand is high, said Jim Berger, a partner at the law firm Norton Rose Fulbright who specializes in financing renewable energy projects.

California has a 2045 goal of carbon neutrality. But “when the sun goes down we’re relying more on fossil fuel generation,” Berger said. “These projects are huge so when you add a project or a couple projects, you’re adding significantly to the power generation base in the state,” he said.

The lease areas have the potential to generate 4.5 gigawatts of energy — enough for 1.5 million homes — and could bring big changes to communities in the rural coastal regions nearest the leases.

In remote Humboldt County, in northern California, the offshore projects are expected to generate more than 4,000 thousand jobs and $38 million in state and local tax revenue in an area that’s been economically depressed ever since the decline of the timber industry in the 1970s and 1980s, according to the Humboldt Bay Harbor, Conservation and Recreation District.

The district already received $12 million from California to prepare its deep-water port for the potential assembly of the massive turbines, which are too tall to fit under most bridges as they are towed out to sea, said Oetker, the district’s executive director.

“We have hundreds of acres of vacant, underutilized industrial property right on the existing navigation channel … and there’s no overhead bridges or power lines or anything,” he said.
But some are also wary of the projects, despite favoring a transition to clean energy.

Environmentalists are concerned about the impacts on threatened and endangered whales, which could become entangled in the cables that will anchor the turbines. There are also concerns about birds and bats colliding with the turbine blades and whales getting struck by vessels towing components to the site. Federal regulators have set a boating speed limit for the project of less than 12 mph to address that concern, said Kristen Hislop, senior director of the marine program at the Environmental Defense Center.

“Floating offshore wind is brand new and there’s only a couple projects in the world and we don’t know how that’s going to impact our coast,” she said.

Tribes in the vast coastal regions also worry about damage to their ancestral lands from turbine assembly plants and transmission infrastructure. They fear that the farms will be visible on clear days from sacred prayer spots high in the mountains.

Frankie Myers, vice chairman of the Yurok Tribe, has attended four wind developer conferences in the past year. Tribes worked with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which is overseeing the leasing process, to secure a 5 percent bid credit that includes tribal communities for the first time, he said. The agency also helped with a cultural assessment of the potential impact on views from sacred prayer spots, he said.

The tribes are so engaged now, early on, because they are used to outside industries coming to them with promises that aren’t fulfilled. They’ve seen things done wrong, and knowing this windswept area intimately, they want this to be done right, he said.

“Before they even showed us the map, before they even showed us all of their breakdowns … we were like, ‘We know exactly where it’s going,'” Myers said. “There’s no question where the best wind comes from, we all understand that. We’ve been here for a couple of thousand years.”

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By Gillian Flaccus

The Associated Press

PORTLAND — A renewable energy plant in Oregon that combines solar power, wind power and massive batteries to store the energy generated there officially opened Wednesday as the first utility-scale plant of its kind in North America.

The facility, which at maximum output can generate enough electricity to power a small city, addresses a key challenge facing the utility industry as the U.S. transitions away from fossil fuels and increasingly to solar and wind farms for power. Wind and solar are clean sources of power, but utilities have been forced to fill in gaps when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining with fossil fuels like coal or natural gas.

At the Oregon plant, massive lithium batteries store up to 120 megawatt-hours of power generated by the 300-megawatt wind farm and 50-megawatt solar farm so it can be released to the electric grid on demand. At maximum output, the facility can produce more than half of the power that was generated by Oregon’s last coal plant, which was demolished earlier this month.

On-site battery storage isn’t new, and interest in solar-plus-battery projects in particular has soared in the U.S. in recent years due to robust tax credits and incentives and falling prices of batteries. The Wheatridge Renewable Energy Facility in Lexington, however, is the first in the U.S. to combine integrated wind, solar and battery storage at such a large scale in one location, giving it even more flexibility to generate continuous output without relying on fossil fuels to fill in gaps.

The project is “getting closer and closer to having something with a very stable output profile that we traditionally think of being what’s capable with a fuel-based generation power plant,” said Jason Burwen, vice president of energy storage at the American Clean Power Association, an advocacy group for the clean power industry. “If the solar is chugging along and cloud cover comes over, the battery can kick in and make sure that the output is uninterrupted. As the sun goes down and the wind comes online, the battery can make sure that that’s very smooth so that it doesn’t, to the grid operator, look like anything unusual.”

The plant, located in a remote expanse off Oregon Route 74 south of Boardman, is a partnership between NextEra Energy Resources and Portland General Electric, a public utility required to reduce carbon emissions by 100 percent by 2040 under an Oregon climate law – one of the most ambitious in the nation – passed last year.

PGE’s customers are also demanding green power – nearly a quarter-million of them receive only renewable energy – and the Wheatridge project is “key to that decarbonization strategy,” said Kristen Sheeran, PGE’s director of sustainability strategy and resource planning.

Under the partnership, PGE owns one-third of the wind output and purchases all the facility’s power for its renewable energy portfolio. NextEra, which developed the site and operates it, owns two-thirds of the wind output and all the solar output and storage.

“The mere fact that many other customers are looking at these types of facilities gives you a hint at what we think could be possible,” said David Lawlor, NextEra’s director of business development for the Pacific Northwest. “Definitely customers want firmer generation, starting with the battery storage in the back.”

Large-scale energy storage is critical as the U.S. shifts to more variable power sources like wind and solar, and Americans can expect to see similar projects across the country as that trend accelerates. National Renewable Energy Laboratory models show U.S. storage capacity may rise fivefold by 2050, yet experts say even that wouldn’t be enough to prevent extremely disruptive climate change.

Batteries aren’t the only solution being explored by the clean energy industry. Pumped storage generates power by sending huge volumes of water downhill through turbines. Other experiments involve forcing water underground and holding it there before releasing it to power turbines.

But interest in batteries for clean energy storage has grown dramatically in recent years amid falling battery costs and improving technology. That has boosted interest in hybrid plants, experts say.

Generating capacity from hybrid plants increased 133 percent between 2020 and 2021 and by the end of last year, there were nearly 8,000 megawatts of wind or solar generation connected to storage, according to the U.S. Energy Department‘s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which is managed by the University of California.

Most such projects are solar power with battery storage, largely because of tax credits. But projects in the pipeline include offshore wind-plus-battery, hydroelectric-plus-battery and at least nine facilities like the one in Oregon that will combine solar, wind and storage. Projects in the pipeline between 2023 and 2025 include ones in Washington, California, Arizona, Idaho, Iowa, Illinois and Oregon, according to Berkeley Lab.

Many researchers and pilots are working on alternatives to lithium-ion batteries, however, largely because their intrinsic chemistry limits them to around four hours of storage and a longer duration would be more useful.

“There is no silver bullet,” Sheeran said. “There’s no model or prototype that’s going to meet that entire need … but wind and solar will certainly be in the mix.

“This model can become a tool for decarbonization across the West as the whole country is driving toward very ambitious climate reduction goals.”

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By JENNIFER McDERMOTT
Associated Press

At a 131-year-old maritime academy along Buzzards Bay in Massachusetts, people who will build the nation’s first commercial-scale offshore wind farm are learning the skills to stay safe while working around turbines at sea.

Some take to the tasks fairly easily since they’re veterans of marine fields or construction. For others, it’s totally new to be using fall protection and sea survival equipment, climbing from a boat onto a ladder to get to a turbine and learning how to work hundreds of feet in the air.

Offshore wind developers are hiring, after years of touting the promise of tens of thousands of jobs the industry could create in the United States. To launch this new clean energy industry, they now need plenty of workers with the right training and skills.

“It’s the sheer number of people we’re going to need in the timeframe that we need them,” said Jennifer Cullen, senior manager of labor relations and workforce development at Vineyard Wind in Massachusetts. “We’re combating this sense of, we’ve been talking about it for so long, … is it actually coming? We’re telling people, yes, it’s here, it’s now.

“We’re building the turbines next year and we’re going to be building many more wind farms after this,” she added.

Vineyard Wind is on track to be the first commercial-scale offshore wind farm in the U.S. The development follows the Cape Wind project, which would’ve been closer to the Massachusetts shore but failed after years of litigation and local opposition.

The Massachusetts Maritime Academy is the only place in Massachusetts currently offering the basic safety training designed by a nonprofit founded by wind turbine manufacturers and operators — the Global Wind Organisation — though training is offered in other states. Everyone who will go to a wind farm offshore must complete safety training, and most developers meet the requirement with the GWO program.

The course draws union workers and others eager to work on future wind farms that the Biden administration wants to dot U.S. coastlines to help fight climate change. President Joe Biden set a goal of 30 gigawatts of offshore wind energy by 2030, to power more than 10 million homes and create 80,000 jobs.

The payoff for offshore wind trainees is jobs with an average salary approaching $80,000 a year.
Before arriving at the academy, students complete about six hours of online coursework.

Then, wearing waterproof suits, they practice stepping off a vessel in Buzzards Bay and onto a boarding ladder connected to a turbine — a dangerous part of the job, especially in rough seas.

The students step off the pier into the chilly bay waters to learn how to safely abandon a vessel or the turbine in an emergency. They inflate a life raft, climb in, and right it when it’s upside down.

To prepare for working at heights, they use a harness and fall protection gear to ascend and descend a turbine’s ladder. They practice lowering themselves by ropes from a 20-foot platform in case of emergency evacuation. And they rescue a fellow student who feigns being injured.

A day is devoted to first aid basics and CPR, and they put out a small fire with extinguishers.
Many trainees will be headed to work on Vineyard Wind, 15 miles off the Massachusetts coast.

With 62 turbines, the project is expected to produce 800 megawatts — enough electricity annually to power more than 400,000 homes, beginning in late 2023. Work began onshore late last year.

Daniel Szymkowiak, a 36-year-old engineer, used to work offshore in the oil and gas industry. He took the maritime academy course in August, and now works on wind farm subsea cables for Vineyard Wind.

Szymkowiak changed careers, he said, because working in renewable, wind energy made him feel better about the world’s future.

“It’s up and coming. To be the first commercial project in the states, that’s exciting,” he said. “To make a positive change for our country, to bring across new opportunities, that’s exactly why I’m here.”

The maritime academy, founded in 1891, has historically focused on Coast Guard-approved training for professional mariners. Anticipating needs of the nascent U.S. offshore wind industry, it expanded its courses in support of offshore wind in 2019.

Over 200 people have completed the basic safety training at the academy’s Maritime Center for Responsible Energy, in collaboration with RelyOn Nutec. The center plans to use grant funding to expand its offshore wind courses with basic technical training, enhanced first aid and advanced rescue, said Michael Burns, executive director of the maritime center. The safety course, offered twice a month, is booked through the end of the year.

In the classes, there’s a sense of excitement to work offshore, take on a new challenge and help launch the industry, Burns said. He expects to see more schools and companies offering the training to meet the growing demand.

“We want to do everything in our power to do our part to help ensure these projects are able to go off on their intended timelines,” Burns said.

In neighboring Rhode Island, Danish wind developer Orsted and utility Eversource are partnering with the state, the Community College of Rhode Island and union leaders to start a basic safety training course there too. Orsted and Eversource are planning to build Revolution Wind, a 400-megawatt wind farm south of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, to provide power for Connecticut and Rhode Island.

The first U.S. offshore wind farm opened off Rhode Island’s Block Island in late 2016. But with five turbines, it’s not commercial scale.

Cullen, of Vineyard Wind, said the role of the training is to qualify people to work for a variety of developers and to ramp up the workforce. Vineyard Wind is also working with a Martha’s Vineyard program to prepare local residents for jobs as technicians.

Tyler Spofford has been working for GE Offshore Wind since January. The 35-year-old left his job as a tugboat captain to spend more time with his family.

Spofford said he’s excited the offshore wind industry is creating jobs, especially for mariners in the Northeast. There were few workboat jobs in the region after he earned his degree and license in 2009 at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy. That led him to the Gulf of Mexico, where he worked in the oil and gas industry.

“Pretty much since I got out of school, offshore wind was always a thing that was kind of being discussed, but nothing was really ever happening that was to scale,” he said.

Then, Spofford said, the “stars aligned.” He now helps assess the Vineyard Wind project’s needs for vessels, assists in sourcing and contracting for the vessels, and will manage them. He took the maritime academy course in August.

“It kind of feels like we’re a part of this startup in a way,” he said. “We’re up against a lot of challenges. It’s kind of fun to think them through and solve them and come up with a product and something that’s going to work, a solution.”

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CASPER, Wyo. (AP) — An electric utility has completed its plan to more than double the amount of wind power it can send to customers in the Rocky Mountain region and Northwest.

Rocky Mountain Power’s Energy Vision 2020 plan, announced in 2017, included four Wyoming wind projects: Cedar Springs I, Cedar Springs II, Ekola Flats and TB Flats. Combined, they have a capacity of 1,150 megawatts, enough for more than 300,000 average-sized homes.

The program also involved revamping existing wind farms and building 140 miles of transmission line between Medicine Bow and Rock Springs in southern Wyoming.

The expanded wind capacity goes to customers in Wyoming as well as California, Idaho, Oregon, Utah and Washington — the six states served by Rocky Mountain Power’s parent company, Portland, Oregon-based PacifiCorp, the Casper Star-Tribune reports.

The final Wyoming wind project, the 500-megawatt TB Flats wind farm in Carbon County, went online in April. It took Rocky Mountain Power several months to declare the facility commercially operational.

“We’re not done yet,” Rocky Mountain Power spokesman David Eskelsen said. “The demand for electricity is continuing to grow, the energy economy is changing rapidly, and so we look to Wyoming to be a resource to help us meet the needs of our customers for many years to come.”

PacifiCorp has wind farms elsewhere but Wyoming has the best sites for wind density in the utility’s service territory, Eskelsen said.

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The nonprofit Energy Trust of Oregon recently launched a new wind resource calculator that allows Portland-area residents to evaluate the viability of small wind turbines on their properties. The calculator is called WindSight and is powered by a Brooklyn, N.Y., company called Wind Analytics.

It allows customers of Portland General Electric and Pacific Power to check the strength of the wind at properties that are larger than one acre. Just visit , enter the property’s address and the calculator will say whether the site has “poor,” “fair,” “good” or “excellent” wind conditions.

Energy Trust recently increased its incentives for small wind turbines that are 50 kilowatts or smaller. Incentives are based on the estimated annual energy production of a given site and can equal up to 60 percent of the installed cost of a small wind turbine system. State and federal tax incentives are also available.

Energy Trust works with a network of trade ally contractors for the siting and installation of small wind turbines. A list can be found at .

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Two Oregon land conservation groups last week jointly filed a lawsuit challenging the U.S. Interior Department’s approval of the , a proposed $300 million wind farm that would be built in the high desert of Harney County.

The and the claim the Interior Department was operating illegally when it approved a 43-mile transmission line for the project in December.

According to Brent Fenty, executive director of the ONDA, the Interior Department did not take proper steps to gauge how the line would affect wildlife in the area, which is required under the National Environmental Policy Act. Additionally, Fenty said the line would impose upon land protected by a congressional designation issued in 2000.

“It’s unfortunate in a time when we’re all committed to trying to see renewable projects happen that instead of focusing on the areas we can agree on, we’re focusing on an area that most Oregonians would agree is not a good place for wind development,” Fenty said.

Columbia Energy Partners, based in Vancouver, Wash., wants to put 40 to 60 wind turbines on private property on the north side of Steens Mountain. The turbines would generate 104 megawatts of power that would be bought by , one of the largest electric utilities in California. The transmission line is an essential project piece because it would allow the power produced to be transferred away from the farm.

Initially, Columbia Energy Partners was going to build four wind farms in the area, but those plans were scaled back for reasons unknown to the public. Nevertheless, Fenty believes that even a reduced-scope project could damage the area; he hopes the lawsuit will prevent construction entirely.

“We spent a lot of time trying to work through changes that could be made to the project, but underlying all of this is the belief that there are better places to do this kind of development,” Fenty said. “It’s an incredible place that we believe should be protected for future generations.”

Bob Sallinger, conservation director of the Audubon Society of Portland, said Steens Mountain is not an optimal place for wind development because it contains a large number of rare animal species. Sallinger said the transmission line could potentially disrupt migratory routes and breeding areas for the species and that the Interior Department did not adequately consider known data identifying the presence of eagles and raptors in the area.

“Right now, we are seeing a gold rush mentality where some developers are willing to pursue industrial development even on our most sacred landscapes,” Sallinger said. “This represents the first time that Portland Audubon has sued to stop a wind project in Oregon – it speaks to the importance of this landscape and to the inappropriateness of this project.”

Both Sallinger and Fenty also said that the line would pass through public land designated as a Cooperative Management and Protection Area by Congress. Under the law, the Interior Department is required to protect the land’s “long-term ecological integrity.” The lawsuit states that the line could put that integrity at risk.

However, Harney County officials plan to “aggressively respond” to the lawsuit, claiming it is invalid. Harney County Judge Steve Gratsky said Columbia Energy Partners spent millions of dollars on impact studies that demonstrated how the project’s environmental effects could be mitigated. He added that only a small portion of the transmission line would be within the CMPA.

“The thing that’s most frustrating to me is them sitting in a small, rural community organization Sunday and talking about how they were collaborating with the community – then three days later filing a litigation,” Gratsky said. “From a commerce point of view, this is the anti-groups having all the power to stop things.”

Gratsky said that the line would affect only a few thousand dollars worth of the acreage valued at $6.5 million.

Randy Fulton, the county’s economic development director, said the lawsuit does not say how the project would affect local residents. According to Fulton, the project would provide more than 100 construction jobs in an area that has struggled to adjust since the Edward Hines Lumber Co., which had provided more than 1,000 jobs, left in the late 1980s.

“They mention some endangered species that might be affected, but we’ve got to be considered as one of those species affected,” Fulton said. “I understand what they’re thinking, but we have to have a right to survive down here.”

Fulton said communicating with the ONDA has been difficult; for example, he claimed that he invited Fenty to speak at a town hall meeting in Harney County and received no response. Fenty, meanwhile, said the developers and county officials have not listened to the ONDA’s recommendations, including a report compiled by the organization that lists half a million acres elsewhere in the state optimal for wind development.

Gratsky said the county is planning to challenge the lawsuit. Neither the Interior Department nor Columbia Energy Partners would comment on the matter.

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In an effort to resolve a heated dispute with renewable energy producers that began last spring, the on Tuesday released a new plan to manage the region’s electric grid when supply exceeds demand.

But regional wind advocates say the plan is inadequate, despite changes made since a draft was released in February.

When heavy rains and snowmelt runoff created a huge surge in hydropower last spring, the BPA faced an oversupply of electricity that could have overwhelmed the grid. The federal agency, which owns about 75 percent of the region’s high-voltage transmission system, resorted to unplugging wind turbines because spilling excess water around its dams could have harmed salmon in the Columbia River.

But in December, the ruled that the BPA erred when it cut off wind production. This week, the BPA proposed a monetary settlement with the wind producers in an effort to meet FERC’s nondiscriminatory transmission tariff requirements.

The BPA proposes to cover half the cost of damages incurred by wind producers. When turbines are turned off, they lose the value of production as well as federal production tax credits that accrue only when the wind farms are generating electricity.

The immediate losses to hit wind companies last year amounted to approximately $10 million, according to data compiled by the .

Under the new plan, the BPA’s first course of action during periods of excessive power generation would be to divert water through dams’ spillways rather than power-producing turbines. But environmental rules restrict excessive use of spillways.

The agency would then offer low-cost or free hydropower to replace the output of thermal and other power plants. If supply still exceeds demand, the BPA would again unplug wind farms and other generators; but now it would pay for lost revenue.

The agency expects that amount to be approximately $12 million a year. Depending on weather, that amount could jump to $50 million or drop to nearly nothing, according to BPA spokesman Doug Johnson.

Wind advocates contend that the plan sidesteps what they see as a deeper problem: The BPA doesn’t treat power from other generators as it treats its own hydropower.

“The concept they’re suggesting does not ensure fair treatment in the future,” said Cameron Yourkowski, senior policy manager covering transmission for the Renewable Northwest Project. “The issue goes beyond this high-flow, spring oversupply re-dispatch situation. We want to know the basic principles established for fairness on the transmission system are being followed.”

The BPA tweaked its plan based on comments it received before Tuesday’s deadline. If FERC were to accept the plan, known as the Oversupply Management Protocol, it would be in place for one year instead of three years, as proposed initially. The BPA also would hire someone from outside the agency to review the amount of money it would offer to curtailed wind producers.

Kevin Lynch, vice president of external affairs for , said the revised plan includes only marginal improvements.

“The filing really misses the mark,” he said. “(The BPA) has a commercial interest in the way power markets react to supply and demand, and that vested interest in the outcome colors their decisions on curtailment.”

And the problem of oversupply is not likely to go away, according to a new analysis issued by the . Between April and June, the Pacific Northwest could exceed the market demand for electricity by 300,000 megawatt-hours, or enough to power approximately 100,000 homes during the same three month period.

While the problem has many industry stakeholders calling for long-term solutions, the BPA is standing behind its one-year proposal.

“For the time being, this is the best way forward,” Johnson said.

But significant spring over-generation could occur about once every four years, according to the council’s analysis, and in some years the excess could soar to 1.2 million megawatt-hours. That worries wind interests.

“We’re not convinced that (the BPA) will make decisions in a nondiscriminatory manner this year (because) they discriminated against us last year,” Lynch said. “We would be much more reassured if the federal regulator were overseeing those decisions.”

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