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Europe's success turned Trump administration on to offshore wind, official says

SNL Image

A lift boat serving as a work platform helps assemble a wind turbine off Block Island, R.I.
Source: Associated Press

An official at the U.S. Department of the Interior said the federal government's interest in offshore wind farms peaked after he saw their potential economic benefits on a trip to Denmark in January.

"You can see the shift in the federal government ... from ... dragging its feet a little bit on the offshore wind program to ... developing that pipeline so that we can see jobs in the future in that sector," Vincent DeVito, energy counselor to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, said June 11 at an event held by the Atlantic Council think tank in Washington, D.C. The federal government also stands to make money by leasing areas off the U.S. coasts to project developers, DeVito said.

The industry has noticed a change. Thomas Brostrøm, head of U.S. operations at Ørsted A/S, has said the Interior Department seems to be drawing on lessons learned in Europe such as streamlining the permitting process by allowing project developers to submit multiple design options.

"Policymakers and permitting agencies are finally aligned" on offshore wind, Avangrid Renewables LLC CEO Laura Beane said in May at an industry conference in Chicago. Project developer Avangrid Renewables is a subsidiary of Avangrid Inc.

Hired to a newly created role at the Interior Department in June 2017, DeVito said a big part of his job is boosting the amount of revenue the Interior Department collects by expediting permitting and making the government a better partner to the private sector. He said the focus on monetizing federal lands and resources does not pose a risk to conservation, adding that efforts to expedite permitting are made on a project-by-project basis.

"How big [of] an examination has to be done for a particular project?" asked DeVito, a former industry lawyer who previously served as treasurer of a political action committee affiliated with Zinke. "Do we have to require a project proponent to do a study on the site for impacts 20, 30, 40 years out, or can we limit that to five years or 10 years?"

While some critics contend the Trump administration is bowing to the fossil fuel industry as it pursues a deregulatory agenda, DeVito insisted the government is taking an "all of the above" approach to energy. "Everything we have done so far has been basically unlocking the tools that have been in the shed ... for the past decade or so," he said.

However, DeVito expressed reservations about building solar projects on public lands, echoing comments Zinke has made in the past.

Solar is "a difficult pill to swallow sometimes because once you put a utility-scale solar array up, that's all the land's good for," DeVito said. He also raised concerns over environmental impacts, including potential harm to birds, associated with concentrating solar power plants, which have struggled to gain traction in the U.S.