'It's a unique, differentiated opportunity that offshore wind brings'

Some states recognise that we are in the building stages of the industry and they’re willing to pay a little bit higher megawatt-per-hour price to get some infrastructure in their state, get some supply chain capacity in their state... and others are more focused on low-cost power. We’re listening to both [approaches] and matching our strategy to both.

We want to be ‘local’, so even though we’re a Danish company, we want to be an American company here, and so I think it says a lot that that I was hired as the CEO, a US Navy veteran, I obviously bleed red, white, and blue.

[Orsted] came over in 2016 [to the US] and opened an office here in Boston, Massachusetts and were influential in getting the policies for the state in place to get the first offshore wind solicitation. We were a little bit disappointed and surprised when Vineyard won the first project [the 800MW Vineyard Wind 1], but we kept our heads down and kept expanding.

We’re partnering with folks who have the local knowledge. We created our joint venture with Eversource up here in New England, where we have 2GW of our 4GW, and then we’ve got a [joint venture] partnership with PSEG on our Ocean Wind 1 project and we’ve got some other JV relationships with PSEG with some other lease areas down in the mid-Atlantic.

Our utility JV partners are doing the onshore works for example and we’re jointly working on permitting, so we think that’s a good combination.

We’re trying to listen to our customers, and we try to be responsive to them but we're also trying to build a long-term sustainable industry, not just trying to check a box and build one project, we want to be here long term. This is our core business.

Today we’re creating these construction jobs that are building the manufacturing infrastructure, and then they’ll be manufacturing jobs in all those supply chain markets, and then they’ll be construction jobs building onshore and offshore wind farms, and there will be O&M [operations and maintenance] jobs. If you add all that up, it’s literally thousands of great jobs, so it’s a unique, differentiated opportunity that offshore wind brings. When you go into Tier 2 and Tier 3, it is right now, they’ve already identified offshore wind driving manufacturing capability in 44 states so we're literally creating thousands of jobs.

There’s a lot of talk about the supply chain and the blue-collar jobs and the offshore jobs, but I also hope that as this industry progresses then we bring the American ingenuity and bring the technology here.

Right now, a lot of the high-tech part of the industry is still in Europe, but I hope that over time we can also have the R&D hubs and then actually export some technological capability, and I have full confidence in this country that we have that capability as well.

We are playing catch-up now but there are areas that the whole globe is still trying to figure out. We’ve got some technology pilots going on right now in the US that if they work, will be exported everywhere, [such as] different technologies for mammal detection, or technologies for site investigation.

We’re definitely monitoring floating very actively. I think publicly at the group level we acknowledge and confirm that this is something that we’re going to be more aggressive on. I think historically we’ve – I don’t want to say leaned back but – we've been focused on our fixed bottom pipeline and now we’re definitely more engaged in the floating dialogue. We’ve got some project work going globally right now, and likewise we’re looking at the floating opportunities in the US, in California, in the Gulf of Maine, and other places, so were definitely got some folks here in the strategy team really trying to figure out our approach there, but we are active and engaged.

There is quite a bit of activity going on in the ports now, with us and others. For example, the New Jersey Wind Port and our big project in New London, Connecticut, those two assets will be very competitive industry assets I would say.

We are doing some things at Tradepoint Atlantic in Maryland as well, so I am not as worried about port infrastructure.

The Jones Act concerns me more because there is just such uncertainty about exactly what is Jones Act qualified and what’s not, and as the laws are being interpreted today, will that remain?

And quite frankly we have got a global [wind turbine installation] vessel challenge, so it’s not even just about Jones Act, it's general global vessel availability, because offshore wind’s not just booming here, you saw Germany announced a big target for offshore wind [last week], there’s lots of stuff happening in Asia, the UK, et cetera, so we’ve got a global vessel challenge and then the Jones Act on top of it. It's just that much more challenging.

But it is a little bit tricky because you’re committing to the vessel before you’ve got all of your projects. You risk from a permitting standpoint to then make a commitment to a vessel, or for a vessel guy to make a commitment without a contract with someone like us, it’s a little bit of a vicious circle of who’s going to jump in first.

But now we’re definitely looking into that and then like I said there’s a whole bunch of other vessels, maintenance vessels, foundation installation vessels, et cetera, that that we’ve got to figure out too.

We are really listening to Washington [and] really trying to go as fast as we can... but you hear people talking about 100% US steel – we’ll use as much steel as we can, but right now ‘100% US steel’ isn’t actually even available.

We don’t have the capability to produce the right types of steel for our foundation plates, for example, so we’ve just got to kind of keep everything at pace. It takes three years to build a monopile factory and in due course we’re creating some additional capabilities in our steel plant in Kentucky, but it’s going to take a few years and even that won't have all of the capability probably that we’ll need for 100% US steel, so we just got to try to keep everything measured and be progressing and not overburden the offshore wind industry too early with all the incremental demands that we eventually want and we’re eventually willing to do.

We’re building our very first projects right now, and hopefully we can get those up and going before we add on more requirements.

We need to be there creating incentives for local content and local manufacturing. We’re supportive of that, but we just want to make sure that it actually works for the industry and that we get the benefits they think we're going to get, so it might require a little bit more phasing into something just because it takes time to get all this in place.

There's a lot of answers to that question. I'm super-grateful for Amanda Lefton in the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management [BOEM] and the Department of Interior and the progress that they’re making, and I know they’ve got big ambitions, they’ve done a lot already in the first part of this year and we expect them to continue to do more.

They’ve got a big backlog of permits that they have got to get through, and they want to do it right, we want to do it right, where we want to build these in a sustainable way. But it takes a lot of time, there’s a lot of stakeholders, so it can create some uncertainty until you finally get to the ROD [record of decision] like we were able to do with [the 132MW] South Fork off New York.

We’re just trying to front load that as much as possible, see if we can create some national structures for fishing compensation or section 106 historical preservation concerns, so that these things don’t come to a head late in the process. I think that BOEM’s on board with that and is starting to look at that and we’re trying to be a thought-partner with them on what would work for the industry, but also doing it in a way that’s as litigation-proof as possible.

So, there's definitely some trickiness all this but again I think it's a little bit par-for-the-course. It is early stages of this industry and of course there’s going to be some growing pains. We’ve got to work out some things.

One of the things that’s a little bit challenging right now for us in particular is, although Vineyard’s first, then we have the next four projects in a row.

We were held up during the last administration so now we're trying to keep the same commitments to the states as if we weren’t held up, and so now we're moving forward and it’s going to be interesting to see if all this goes smoothly, or if we are going to end up with some delays or having to re-engineer the projects, but we are definitely really trying to make it work and hoping that we get the support from the permitting agencies both in the states and federal government to make it happen.

It has been a fun year-plus working on that. We’ve done a lot to listen to our customer and we think we’ve put forward a very attractive local content offering especially for the volume – they’re getting the highest bang for their buck on local content of any state, at least for our offer and at our prices.

We think the market is competitive and we’re trying to be as aggressive as we can, but also realistic. We’ve got a lot of experience on what things really are costing now in the US, and so we’ll just have to see how the Maryland PSC (public service commission) views our offer versus the competition.

And you know they’re [US Wind -- the competing developer] a different kind of company. We’re a develop, build, own, operate be-there-forever, long term partner. We’ll be the ones executing our commitments, et cetera. I don't want to say anything negative about anybody, but you know their business model is different than that. So, we’ll just have to just see how they view us versus them, or if there’s a way to do both, and we’re all anxious to find out, hopefully before Christmas.

I think it’s a real unique opportunity and another benefit of offshore wind. We talked about jobs and economic development and infrastructure but this opportunity to have the just transition and go out of our way to bring environmental justice communities into our industry and I think we’re again trying to show leadership on that.

We’ve got some specific initiatives in New Jersey, for example. As part of our Ocean Wind 2 project in the Port of Newark, we will take a bunch of diesel trucks out of the port and put electric trucks there using a charging station that's powered by offshore wind, reducing smog for that community. I think in some of our next round bids in Maryland and in New York we’ve got a lot of specific ideas on things related to environmental justice, not least scholarships, and training opportunities, but also some other ways, for example, to take a [fossil fuel-fired] peaker plant out of commission in “asthma alley” in New York, these are things that are on our mind. Building manufacturing facilities and environmental justice communities, that’s a core part of our strategy.

We really appreciate the recognition and I appreciate the fact that it was a Leadership Award. It means a lot to us and it’s really a testament to the dedication and expertise of our team.

I just really want to thank BNOW and Liz Burdock for their leadership and everything they're doing to drive forward the industry and the president's goal of 30GW by 2030. I know that they’re working hard to educate stakeholders, they’re very focused on the supply chain part of this story, and I am just thankful for their recognition of us as a leader.