New England grid gets $389M boost to help plug in offshore wind

“New England is no different from the rest of the country, where we’re projecting [electric] load growth, and we’re seeing the grid not keep up,” Jeremy McDiarmid, managing director at Advanced Energy United, told Canary Media.

The DOE funding comes as Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island have banded together to coordinate their bidding processes for new offshore wind projects, in an effort to both scale up the industry and reduce costs for ratepayers. Formalized last year, the agreement, state leaders say, is the first joint-procurement plan of its kind.

Under the agreement, the states include calls for multistate proposals within their usual offshore wind solicitation process. If a joint project is selected, the states involved split both the electricity generated from and the costs of the project, up to the limits of their procurement authority. Spreading costs in this way makes it easier to finance and build larger-scale offshore wind installations.

In the current round of proposals, four developers bid for a cumulative 6,000 megawatts across the three states. That includes four multistate proposals, in addition to individual bids.

“With the three states going in collaboratively, it sends a strong market signal [and increases confidence] … that this region is serious about offshore wind,” Kelt Wilska, offshore wind director for the Environmental League of Massachusetts, told Canary Media.

That market signal is especially critical given the recent struggles in the industry; last year, rising prices and issues with the supply chain led to the cancellation of more than half the contracted projects in the country, according to analysis from the Oceantic Network. Thousands of megawatts’ worth of projects in New England were canceled; in Massachusetts, two of the projects proposed in the joint procurements are rebrands of those canceled projects.

Details of which projects have been selected were supposed to be announced this week, but they were ultimately delayed because of the news of DOE transmission funding, according to the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources and Rhode Island Energy. The announcements for the next slate of offshore wind projects are now expected next month.

So far, operating as a regional unit appears to be succeeding — and gaining ground. While the DOE funding was awarded to the group of New England states this application period, Massachusetts had unsuccessfully applied in a previous round as an individual state. Additionally, last month the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency awarded the New England Coalition $450 million to increase heat pump deployment in the region.

“We’re not gonna hit our climate goals independently if we don’t work together, because we have a regional grid,” said Wilska. ​“The states know this.”