COPENHAGEN, July 1 (Reuters) - The United States must speed
up project permits if it is to meet the Biden administration's
2030 target for offshore wind power, major developer Orsted
said on Thursday.
The United States, with just two small offshore wind
facilities, has lagged European nations in developing the
renewable energy technology.
The administration of President Joe Biden has set a goal to
install 30 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind power capacity in
U.S. waters by 2030 – nearly the amount that already exists in
Europe's two-decade old industry. Yet it can take as much as 10
years to plan and build new projects.
"To have 30 GW installed by 2030 will mean that permitting
processes need to be expedited," Orsted's chief commercial
officer and deputy CEO Martin Neubert told Reuters.
Neubert spoke a day after New Jersey regulators announced
that Denmark's Orsted and a consortium of Royal Dutch Shell
and EDF had been awarded two offshore wind
farm tenders in the Northeastern state, the largest such awards
in U.S. history.
Biden's move towards wind power came after his predecessor,
Donald Trump, threw the industry into doubt when he cancelled
the first commercial-scale offshore wind farm's permit
application during his term.
"No doubt that the entire offshore wind industry in the U.S.
has been suffering from the permitting moratorium that we have
experienced over the last years," Neubert said and welcomed
efforts by the Biden administration to make amends.
"We see real actions in creating the momentum to move
forward on the federal permitting side," he added. .
Significant amounts of new seabed leases and a massive
build-out of the grid were also needed in order to reach the
ambitious target, Neubert said.
(Reporting by Stine Jacobsen; Editing by Pravin Char)
