The nascent U.S. offshore wind industry is faring better than the rest of the energy sector in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, with no project delays yet attributable to the shutdown, participants in the virtual International Partnering Forum heard this week.

However, federal officials and project developers still differ on whether the status quo is good enough, industry stakeholders learned.

The Business Network for Offshore Wind postponed its premier event of the year until August, replacing the physical conference planned for Rhode Island with a two-day virtual event April 21-22.

“Virtual really is the future,” CEO Liz Burdock said. “Physical, in-person events will always have a place in our planning, but low-carbon conferences are going to play an important role in educational offerings starting on Earth Day 2020, as we help our members meet their CO2 emission commitments.”

Following is some of what we overheard at the virtual conference.

BOEM on Track

James Bennett, chief of the Office of Renewable Energy Programs at the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, took questions on the potential impacts of the pandemic on the federal permitting process for Vineyard Wind and other projects, as well as the impacts on federal leasing.

“The COVID-19 situation is certainly having its effect on just about all business processes everywhere,” Bennett said. “We are in a full telework arrangement right now, and we’re continuing to work according to the schedule that we have for Vineyard Wind.

“We don’t anticipate any schedule slips just yet, and a lot of it will depend on how things work out with COVID and whether we’re able to have the stakeholder involvement at the level that we’d like to, but overall, we’re on track and on schedule for Vineyard Wind and the other projects as well,” he said.

The demand for offshore wind has never been greater, and it’s going to be a key component of a diversified national energy portfolio, Bennett said.

Through BOEM, the Interior Department has issued 16 commercial leases for offshore wind development. The department is reviewing seven construction and operation plans and anticipates seeing another five in the next year or so, Bennett said.

Aggressive renewable energy goals by the states, followed up by solicitations for offtake — about half of which have been awarded — have combined with federal leasing to create a tremendous market opportunity, he said.

“Hopefully starting next month, we will have steel in the water with the Virginia offshore wind project, and over the course of the decade, we’re looking at 12 to 15 or even more projects just on existing leases,” Bennett said. “This represents a massive amount of economic activity, in the neighborhood of $25 billion per year by the end of the decade.”

The Jersey Pinch

Bennett said BOEM faces immediate challenges, such as keeping up with plan approvals and permitting, and ensuring robust, informative environmental analysis. It also faces long-term challenges.

“How much leasing is enough, and will procurements keep pace, not only with the demand from the states, but with our industrial capability to develop offshore wind?”

Technological issues include developing transmission in an efficient and cost-effective way. Procurements need clarity to address the maximum complexity, and “we need one right of way for each development,” he said.

Bill White, CEO of project developer EnBW North America, said the industry’s main challenge is getting BOEM to pick up the pace on approving permits and processing lease areas.

“We see a real significant opportunity that the Department of the Interior and BOEM can help relaunch this economy in the months ahead” after the pandemic lockdown, White said.

“There are no-cost initiatives that our friends at Interior and BOEM can move forward that would unleash this offshore wind opportunity,” White said. “These are multibillion-dollar projects, and when they’re constructed, they’ll be among the largest construction projects in the United States, and they will mobilize thousands of workers. So moving ahead with the contracted projects … is urgent.”

White hypothesized about a number of new contracts being awarded in New Jersey and New York.

“It’s theoretically possible, I would say quite likely possible, that in 2022, there could be only one project that competes in the New Jersey solicitation for 1,200 MW,” White said. “That could just be Ørsted, or possibly could be just Shell, if Ørsted wins the next New Jersey procurement.”

Few developers are eligible to bid into the New Jersey solicitation in 2022, and no bidders will be able to compete in the procurements for 2024, 2026 and 2028 without additional offshore wind lease areas, he said.

“Our current projections indicate that 2022 will be New Jersey’s last competitive solicitation this decade, and moving forward, New Jersey could fall behind and see more than half their goal [7.5 GW by 2030] not being met,” White said. “It’s trying to demonstrate the urgency for our friends at BOEM … to really move forward this leasing process sooner rather than later.”

Benefits and Reliability

John Dalton, president of energy consultant Power Advisory, said the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority has been very transparent in its offshore solicitation processes and elected to assign 20% of total points to economic benefits.

NYSERDA has developed a 100-point scoring system for project candidates that awards 10 points for viability, 20 points for economic benefit and 70 points for offer prices.

“What this means essentially is that a bidder who is participating in the NYSERDA [request for proposals] is more likely to be in a position where it can make explicit tradeoffs between price and delivering greater economic development benefits to the state of New York,” Dalton said.

Burdock said she would like NYSERDA’s figure for economic benefits to be higher.

“I was a little surprised that it was only 20%,” she said. “There should be more emphasis now on encouraging small businesses to get into the supply chain.”

Eric Hines, director of the Offshore Wind Energy Engineering graduate program at Tufts University, presented the two scenarios common to discussion of transmission buildout. In the first, generators develop the transmission, creating the generator lead line, or radial system. In the second — favored by Hines — an independent transmission developer creates a network system. (See Mass. DOER Explores Transmission for OSW.)

“The interest that we have here is in reliability as we move more and more of the electricity to the grid,” Hines said. “Right now, we’re talking about 30 GW, but if we start talking on the scale of 2050, it would not be at all strange to start talking about 300 GW” or more.

New England has been down this road before when developing land-based wind, he said.

“The idea of a backbone loop is not strange,” Hines said. “In 2009, the New England governors were talking about 12,000 MW of land-based wind plus offshore wind, and now we’re talking about 12,000 MW of offshore wind.”

Much of the region’s thinking about the grid dates back to the blackout of 1965 and experiencing rare, large-scale events, he said. “This is what drive the concepts of reliability, resiliency and our need for a reliable system at times like now, during a pandemic,” Hines said. “This doesn’t happen every year, but these are the things we have to pay attention to in terms of thinking about the long-term infrastructure.”

When people talk about onshore and offshore grids, they’re talking about the same thing, he said.

“The question is, how are we going to generate a whole bunch of power in the ocean and send it across the coastline onto the land?” Hines said. “The biggest issues we have right now are with the points of interconnect, and if we go at the pace we’re going, the developers who have the leases are going to grab all the key points of interconnect, and this is really going to strangle the ability to get electricity onshore.”