EGN NEWS DESK
“New England is not any totally different from the remainder of the nation, the place we’re projecting [electric] load progress, and we’re seeing the grid not sustain,” Jeremy McDiarmid, managing director at Advanced Energy United, informed Canary Media.
The DOE funding comes as Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island have banded collectively to coordinate their bidding processes for brand spanking new offshore wind tasks, in an effort to each scale up the business and scale back prices for ratepayers. Formalized final 12 months, the settlement, state leaders say, is the primary joint-procurement plan of its variety.
Under the settlement, the states embrace requires multistate proposals inside their traditional offshore wind solicitation course of. If a joint mission is chosen, the states concerned break up each the electrical energy generated from and the prices of the mission, as much as the boundaries of their procurement authority. Spreading prices on this approach makes it simpler to finance and construct larger-scale offshore wind installations.
In the present spherical of proposals, 4 builders bid for a cumulative 6,000 megawatts throughout the three states. That consists of 4 multistate proposals, along with particular person bids.
“With the three states stepping into collaboratively, it sends a robust market sign [and increases confidence] … that this area is severe about offshore wind,” Kelt Wilska, offshore wind director for the Environmental League of Massachusetts, informed Canary Media.
That market sign is particularly vital given the latest struggles within the business; final 12 months, rising costs and points with the provision chain led to the cancellation of greater than half the contracted tasks within the nation, based on evaluation from the Oceantic Network. Thousands of megawatts’ value of tasks in New England had been canceled; in Massachusetts, two of the tasks proposed within the joint procurements are rebrands of these canceled tasks.
Details of which tasks have been chosen had been imagined to be introduced this week, however they had been in the end delayed due to the information of DOE transmission funding, based on the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources and Rhode Island Energy. The bulletins for the subsequent slate of offshore wind tasks are actually anticipated subsequent month.
So far, working as a regional unit seems to be succeeding — and gaining floor. While the DOE funding was awarded to the group of New England states this utility interval, Massachusetts had unsuccessfully utilized in a earlier spherical as a person state. Additionally, final month the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency awarded the New England Coalition $450 million to extend warmth pump deployment within the area.
“We’re not gonna hit our local weather targets independently if we don’t work collectively, as a result of we now have a regional grid,” mentioned Wilska. “The states know this.”
