An Offshore Wind Seminar was conducted by the Council of State Governments/Eastern Regional Conference (CSG/ERC) in Nova Scotia. This seminar united the provincial and state officials from Eastern Canada and Northeastern U.S. to catalyze a clean energy resource development that will provide wide environmental and economic advantages to the region.
A report from the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), September 2010, revealed that the country has the potential to create plenty of offshore wind power to the chief cities of the U.S. The report forecasted that by 2030, the offshore wind resource could generate 54 GW of electricity. Such an ocean-based potential is expected to contribute $200 billion for the economy and allow for over 43,000 permanent technical jobs in the field of maintenance, operations, engineering, construction, and manufacturing. Based on the 2008 results, NREL projected that totally, the U.S. has the capacity to generate power of over 4,000 GW from offshore winds, which is four times the country’s overall electricity producing capacity derived from all the other sources.
Although, U.S is dominating the world in land-based wind capacity, there were nil ocean-based projects developed yet till date. According to a latest report revealed by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, nine projects of offshore winds with a potential of about 2,322 MW of energy have been advanced considerably in the development and permitting process. Three of the future projects are under power purchase contracts with Cape Wind in Massachusetts, Deepwater Wind in Rhode Island, and NRG Bluewater Wind in Delaware. The remaining projects are in several developmental stages in other states such as Texas, Ohio, North Carolina, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, and Maine. Globally, the offshore wind capacity is approximately 3,000 MW with the giant share from the European waters.
Source: http://www.csgeast.org/