January 19, 2021 — For Massachusetts to meet its 2050 climate change emission goal, the state is going to have to green the grid, replacing fossil fuel power plants with clean renewable energy sources. To do this, the commonwealth is banking on offshore wind.
“Offshore wind is the linchpin of Massachusetts clean energy strategy and critical to our success,” said State Sen. Michael Barrett, head of the committee that oversees utilities and energy.
By 2030, developers of offshore wind hope to install over 2,000 turbines in the seas from Massachusetts to North Carolina.
The Vineyard Wind project off Martha’s Vineyard was expected to be the nation’s first utility-size wind farm at sea, but navigating the politics and pioneering the uncertain regulatory process has proven more difficult than expected.
Barrett said he blames the Trump administration for stalling the federal environmental permitting process.
“Boy, I feel badly for the private sector developers here,” he said. “They did come to Massachusetts first. Massachusetts beckoned them first, so it’s those private sector firms … they really have been dealt a delay time and again by the Trump people.”
Just days before Vineyard Wind expected to get final approval, federal regulators decided to delay the project for 18 months while a cumulative environmental impact of all proposed offshore projects was conducted.
The Responsible Offshore Development Alliance (RODA), which represents the commercial fishing industry, had wanted to slow the permitting process down.
“You know, it’s really, really hard to evaluate tradeoffs between something really important like fishing, and something really important like climate change mitigation,” said Annie Hawkins, the group’s executive director. “Both of these things need to be addressed together — and they can be — but right now the way we look at it, it’s not happening that way.”