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After decades of fits and starts, the U.S. has one offshore wind farm, which can power only 17,000 homes.
In the North Sea, 75 miles off the Yorkshire coast of England, the world’s largest offshore wind farm began producing electricity in 2019. Powering more than one million homes, Hornsea 1 is the initial segment of a multipronged project to supply energy to millions more. It won’t hold that distinction for long, though, with construction under way on Dogger Bank, also in United Kingdom waters, which will be the world’s biggest offshore site, providing electricity to up to six million homes when fully powered up.
With a fraction of the coastline of the United States, the U.K. is the sixth-largest wind producer in the world and, along with Germany, has transformed Europe into the largest offshore wind power–producing region on the planet. Today, the U.K. has some 40 offshore wind farms producing ten gigawatts of power. (One gigawatt is equal to the output of one nuclear power plant.)
The U.S. has one offshore wind farm.
After decades of fits and starts, despite the nation’s nearly 100,000 miles of coastline and shallow waters suitable for wind farm construction and wind resources that could produce twice the amount of electricity as the U.S. currently uses, the Block Island Wind Farm, a small 30-megawatt facility off the Rhode Island coast that can power up to 17,000 homes, is all the U.S. has to show for offshore wind power.
The nonexistence of a robust offshore wind industry is a stark illustration of the lack of climate urgency in the U.S. when compared to countries like the U.K. The four-year U.S. absence from the Paris Agreement underlines how far the nation has slipped behind Europe in an area where it should excel.
Not surprisingly, the Trump administration’s four-year defection from the battle to save the planet has barely dented the international consensus on the climate crisis. The question the U.S. must confront in the next four years is not so much whether it can catch up with its European allies on offshore wind but whether America can fulfill its own Paris Agreement climate targets and recapture a modicum of international credibility by moving swiftly toward zero carbon emissions.
The bright spot, if it can be called that, is that the United States was able to tread water on the transition to renewables like wind and solar because President Donald Trump’s quest to boost the coal industry ignored the fact that climate science had prevailed on supply and demand in U.S. energy markets.
But for the first time in modern history, the U.S. was isolated and humiliated on the international stage. Most countries lamented the spectacle of an American president defying scientific evidence and fulminating about “big, beautiful coal” or bloviating that wind turbine noise caused cancer and belched exhaust fumes. Trump replaced the Clean Power Plan, the Obama-era regime that served as the foundation of U.S. climate targets, but nothing he did managed to revitalize a fossil fuel industry in decline.
To the contrary, over the past decade American consumers, utility companies, and state policymakers decided to jump-start the transition from fossil fuels to renewables, though their efforts paled alongside Europe’s. This marked a reversal among consumers. In the early 2000s, Americans ratepayers’ aversion to the higher energy prices that then came with wind and solar deterred the rise of these alternative energy sources. In one instance, it intersected with wealthy NIMBYs’ efforts to crush Cape Wind, a controversial Massachusetts offshore proposal that finally collapsed in 2017 after nearly two decades in development.
In Europe beginning in the 1990s, by contrast, broader support for clean energy and a willingness to support investment in the sector drove prices down over time. “Danish and German and British ratepayers paid more for electricity,” says Willett Kempton, the associate director and founder of the University of Delaware’s Center for Research in Wind. “Now they have cost parity electricity from offshore wind, a heckuva lot of jobs, and industries that are exporting valuable project products which aren’t made elsewhere—and they were right.”
In the U.S., ratepayers gradually became more savvy about the consequences of continued reliance on fossil fuels. Over time, they actively sought out companies that integrated renewables wind and solar into the energy mix. Residential homeowners of means paid for solar panel installations. Small onshore wind facilities allowed municipalities to diversify their energy sources. And as awareness of the climate threat increased and interest in renewable energy rose, the energy markets pivoted.
As more onshore wind farms and solar plants came online, prices dropped to the point that they are equal to or below the costs of coal and natural gas, making them more attractive not just to consumers, but to utility companies as well. Those price signals spurred new offshore projects in New England and Mid-Atlantic waters. Some 20 projects are currently in various stages of construction and development, and states are moving to put tens of thousands of megawatts of offshore wind sites in the water by 2035. The onshore wind sector continues to surge ahead, too, with ten new sites to power more than 600,000 homes across nine states, according to the American Wind Energy Association.
Wind energy prices have dropped to the point that they are equal to or below the costs of coal and natural gas.
WITH THE MARKET AND STATE and local governments pushing for clean energy and the Trump administration pushing the other way, the story of the past four years is mixed. The administration was largely unsuccessful in most of its environmental, energy, and natural-resources litigation that ended up in the federal courts, suffering unfavorable rulings or backing off potential lawsuits, according to data compiled by the Institute for Policy Integrity. The solar industry was also tied up in knots, however, by Trump’s obsession with punishing China, which produces most of the world’s solar panels. By slapping a 25 percent tariff on those panels, Trump wreaked havoc on solar installations.
Some highly touted offshore wind projects also ran aground in the tumult. Trump’s first interior secretary, Ryan Zinke, was a major supporter of offshore wind and acquiesced to wind leases off the coasts of Massachusetts and New York. His successor, David Bernhardt, took the opposite tack. Fisheries interests joined him, sowing doubts about wind sites and their impact on fish stocks. The rising uncertainty about federal aims contributed to a pause for another Massachusetts wind project, the long-delayed Vineyard Wind off the southeast Massachusetts coast. Vineyard Wind suddenly withdrew from the federal permitting process a month before an expected environmental-review decision in January of this year, and may be waiting for favorable input from Biden administration officials to proceed.
But the growing appeal of clean energy did not diminish; in particular, the job creation potential of wind and solar projects lured bipartisan support. The Obama-era wind and solar tax credits particularly were incentives that no job-seeking Republican governor could ignore. Texas is the largest producer of onshore wind energy in the U.S. (if it were a nation, it would be the fifth-largest producer in the world) and has the most suitable areas for offshore wind along the Gulf Coast. Deep-red states have embraced solar, among them South Carolina, whose Republican governor, Henry McMaster, decried Trump’s tariffs on Chinese solar panels in testimony before the International Trade Commission two years ago.
Solar and wind tax credits were also included in the December pandemic stimulus package, with credits for offshore wind projects added to the tax code for the first time. The legislation also added funds for clean-energy research and development.
The pandemic has had a negligible effect on existing wind and solar projects in the U.S. After the initial jolt of implementing pandemic safety measures and grappling with workers’ health issues in the early months of COVID-19, work on various wind and solar projects continued. Globally, investment in renewables increased 5 percent in the first half of 2020, due largely to offshore wind projects.
Rejoining Paris is one of Joe Biden’s easiest moves to make in his first year as president. His early decisions on climate, bringing together a deftly calibrated team of climate veterans led by former Obama Secretary of State John Kerry and EPA Director Gina McCarthy, impressed domestic audiences and international allies alike. Trump’s scuttling of the Clean Power Plan was a setback that Biden can undo to pursue more ambitious emissions targets.
However, Biden’s goals of achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2050 and barreling ahead on tightening emissions standards that Trump tore down may run into major challenges with a federal judiciary and Supreme Court stacked with conservative Republican appointees.
AS BIDEN IS WELL AWARE, it’s not as if there’s time to waste. The pandemic led to the sharpest drop in global emissions since World War II, but that development was tempered by the caveat that the concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere continue to increase despite the curtailment of human activity over the course of a year.
The 2021 Climate Change Performance Index found that none of the 57 countries and the European Union, which together produce 90 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, are on a path to meet Paris goals to stave off the global average temperature rise in this century to well below 2 degrees Celsius by limiting increases to no more than 1.5 degrees. In the race to eliminate fossil fuels, the U.K. comes in fifth, while the U.S. is dead last.
A recent report from the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP), the Frankfurt School-UNEP Collaborating Centre, and BloombergNEF found that to rectify that, countries would have to install 3,000 gigawatts of renewables to meet the Paris goals. To date, countries and companies have committed to adding just 826 gigawatts of renewable power (excluding large hydro plants) by 2030.
Biden will seek to convince America’s European allies that the country is serious about improving on its nationally determined contributions.
Trump had little effect on the European and Chinese commitments to the fundamental precepts of the Paris Agreement. Under Obama, as the number one and two contributors to greenhouse gas emissions, China and the U.S. joined together to get the rest of the world to the negotiating table in Paris. With the exception of Brazil and its climate-denying president Jair Bolsonaro, a Trump confrere, there was no commensurate, widespread rollback of environmental policies to match what occurred in the U.S. To the contrary, “Europe was probably more aggressive as a result of Trump,” says Robert Stavins, a professor of energy and economic development at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. “China was delighted to go from co-leadership to sole leadership.”
With Trump withdrawing from Paris, and with the EU and the U.K. preoccupied with Brexit, China skated easily into the leadership vacuum, maintaining an aggressive pace of construction of solar and onshore wind facilities. China has already announced a new climate target of net zero carbon emissions before 2060, in part by strengthening its requirements to reduce greenhouse gas production by 2030. How China plans to achieve those goals while continuing to rely heavily on coal will be closely watched.
For his part, Biden will seek to convince America’s European allies that the country is serious about improving on its nationally determined contributions (each country’s climate goals, in United Nations parlance). Under Obama, the target was a 26 percent to 28 percent reduction below 2005 levels by 2025 and 32 percent by 2030.
At the next round of climate talks, to be held in Glasgow in November, the EU and the U.K. will be interested in seeing serious and detailed longer-term commitments. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has announced that the U.K. will aim to cut its greenhouse gas emissions at a faster pace, to 68 percent by 2030, compared to 1990 levels.
Domestically, Biden’s climate team may find more favorable political tailwinds. A Democratic majority in the Senate means that the party has a chance to bring along Republicans on issues like tax credits. But progress on more serious climate legislation, like enshrining stronger climate action into law, could run into the Senate’s 60-vote hurdle, not to mention a conservative Supreme Court hostile to strong federal environmental regulation.
With the COVID-19 recession showing few signs of abating quickly, a Biden stimulus plan and infrastructure proposal may provide an opportunity to weave renewable components into the legislation—as they began to be in December’s emergency bill. “There will be bipartisan support for a little green tinge if not a deep-green hue to an economic recovery package in the spring,” says Stavins. “Another opportunity for greening is within infrastructure legislation, particularly for the electricity grid, because the electricity grid is going to have to be upgraded in order to have greater reliance on renewables.”
Johnson brought up the climate crisis in his first phone call with Biden, and the world will likewise be watching America’s response to the crisis. At Glasgow, the U.S. has to demonstrate that it can keep pace as the developed world comes forward with even more ambitious plans. But after four years of Trump and their own chaos, the U.K. and Europe may be magnanimous in the short term. The Europeans are “thrilled” with the Democratic victory, says Stavins. Indeed, he adds, “Biden may have a longer honeymoon in Europe than he does in the United States.”
