Another New Jersey offshore wind project runs into turbulence

Nearly a year ago, Danish wind energy giant Orsted scrapped two offshore wind farms planned off New Jersey’s coast, saying they were no longer financially feasible to build.

Atlantic Shores, another project with preliminary approval in New Jersey, is seeking to rebid the financial terms of its project.

And opponents of offshore wind have seized on the disintegration of a wind turbine blade off Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts in July that sent crumbled pieces of it washing ashore on the popular island vacation destination.

Leading Light was one of two projects chosen in January by the state utilities board. But just three weeks after that approval, one of three major turbine manufacturers, GE Vernova, said it would not announce the kind of turbine Invenergy planned to use in the Leading Light Project, according to the filing with the utilities board.

A turbine made by manufacturer Vestas was deemed unsuitable for the project, and the lone remaining manufacturer, Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy, told Invenergy in June “that it was substantially increasing the cost of its turbine offering.”

“As a result of these actions, Invenergy is currently without a viable turbine supplier,” it wrote in its filing.

The project, from Chicago-based Invenergy and New York-based energyRE, would be built 40 miles (65 kilometers) off Long Beach Island and would consist of up to 100 turbines, enough to power 1 million homes.

New Jersey has become the epicenter of resident and political opposition to offshore wind, with numerous community groups and elected officials — most of them Republicans — saying the industry is harmful to the environment and inherently unprofitable.

Supporters, many of them Democrats, say that offshore wind is crucial to move the planet away from the burning of fossil fuels and the changing climate that results from it.

New Jersey has set ambitious goals to become the East Coast hub of the offshore wind industry. It built a manufacturing facility for wind turbine components in the southern part of the state to help achieve that aim.