What happened to the Great Lakes offshore wind boom?
Story by Nicole Pollack, Inside Climate News •
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This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
At the tail end of the aughts, as it became clear that the United States would need to create much more renewable energy, fast, many believed the transition would be bolstered by the proliferation of offshore wind. But not off the coasts of states like Massachusetts and California, where it’s best positioned today. They thought the industry would emerge, and then take hold, in the Great Lakes.
Things looked promising for a while. Glimmers of an offshore wind boom arose from the depths of the Great Recession, as developers offered up proposals on both the U.S. and Canadian sides of the lakes. In 2010, the Cleveland-based Lake Erie Energy Development Corporation, better known as LEEDCo, announced plans to install its first 20 megawatts by 2012 and scale up to 1,000 megawatts by 2020. Two years later, the Obama administration and five states—though not Ohio—formed the Great Lakes Offshore Wind Consortium to help streamline the permitting process.
“That was really a peak of burgeoning interest in climate,” said Greg Nemet, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies energy policy. “There was also a spike in energy prices just before the global financial crisis … that also stimulated awareness and interest in energy. And at the same time, the prices of renewable energy were really starting to come down.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/what-happened-to-the-great-lakes-offshore-wind-boom/ar-AA1kEzVm?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=5e680f2f1a0a47698c6a93a4a77961b1&ei=47
