New Jersey Study Offers Some False Negatives About Offshore Wind: A Call to Action

On November 30, 2005, New Jersey’s Blue Ribbon Panel on Development of Wind Turbine Facilities in Coastal Waters issued an interim report on the impacts of potential wind energy development off the coast of New Jersey.  The Panel’s Interim Report (available here in both Executive Summary and Full format) arrived at some negative conclusions, finding for example, that the impact of offshore wind on emissions is relatively minimal - and that even those minimal benefits might be outweighed by added emissions during the construction process.  (Executive Summary at 7-8).  And the Report also suggested that offshore wind development could result in a loss of 3000 jobs and roughly $97.4 million in revenues because of harm that offshore wind development would purportedly cause to New Jersey’s shore based tourism industry.  Of course, the Report made no mention of potential employment and economic gains that an offshore wind energy industry might bring, which is what environmental advocate Green Peace concluded in its October 2004 Report, Offshore Wind, Onshore Jobs which examined potential impacts of offshore wind development on Great Britain’s economy.

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OREC Urges FERC to Further Facilitate License Waivers

As we last noted in this post, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission continues to maintain jurisdiction over ocean energy projects, though it is willing to consider limited waivers to the license requirements.  Currently, FERC will allow developers to site a project and interconnect with a customer so long as the purpose of the demonstration is to gather data for use in the license application.  In addition, FERC will only grant a waiver in these circumstances for a short period of time. 

OREC supports FERC’s efforts to ease regulatory burdens on developers.  At the same time, we are concerned that even the process to obtain these waivers may become overly cumbersome.  FERC’s recent letter to a developer seeking a waiver suggests that developers may have to submit lengthy explanations to qualify for a short term waiver.  Thus, OREC has filed a letter with FERC proposing to allow developers to obtain the waiver simply upon a certification that the project will utilize new wave or hydrokinetic technology.   Our full letter is available here (PDF form).