Offshore Wind Grid Woes May Be Worse Than Previously Thought
A story in E&E News covers the main findings of an RFF workshop hosted in early December.
Experts are warning that the challenge of connecting large amounts of offshore wind to an aging onshore grid may be much larger than initially realized.
That’s because offshore wind will need to grow very big, very fast to decarbonize the grid, they say...
To reach [the Biden administration's] 2050 target, however, offshore wind would need to swell to 300 GW on the East Coast alone, said Eric Hines, a civil and environmental engineering expert at Tufts University, during an offshore wind panel hosted by Resources for the Future last week.
Hines is not alone in his assessment. While the Biden administration was lauded by industry and activists for the ambitious 30-GW target — which would be a 7,000 percent increase in offshore wind power from today — many academics crunching numbers conclude that the level of emissions cuts called for by Biden would require a lot more power.
