• LetMeEatCake@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    This is an area with huge promise for renewable energy in the US. We have utterly failed to build offshore wind farms up until now. Prior to the Biden admin, there had only been one attempted large scale offshore wind farm in the US. That was Cape Wind off Cape Cod in Massachusetts. It spent over a decade mired in frivolous lawsuits, all of which were defeated. The lawsuits “won” in the end by delaying the project so much that it was no longer able to obtain financing and equipment.

    There’s a large cluster of offshore wind farms going up in the area between Massachusetts’ Martha’s Vineyard and Long Island. Wiki has a nice map of their location.

    This project (Ocean 1 and Ocean 2) are one of the few offshore wind farms in the US being worked on outside of that space. Although they’re still in a generally related part of the US Atlantic coast, taking advantage of the ocean depth, terrain, distance to shore, and wind speed.

    Some other major ones are Virginia’s Offshore Wind, New York’s Empire Wind, and Delaware’s Skipjack Wind. There’s also some sites off the coast of California that were leased out recently, but I do not know of any detailed plans for them yet.

    I’m pretty excited to see progress in this field. Vineyard Wind in MA should be the first large one to come online, starting power delivery this year and finishing construction next year. It should hopefully be a major jolt of energy (pun intended) to offshore wind efforts in the US.