Energy demand is rising in the winter. Offshore wind can help, report says

Offshore wind has had a tough year: The Trump administration put a moratorium on seven major offshore wind leases at the beginning of the year, and went on to withdraw funding from 12 projects and outright cancel another. On top of all that, the entire wind energy industry lost its clean energy tax credits.

But a new report on the renewable energy source’s viability from consultancy Charles River Associates found that offshore wind is well-suited to solve energy dilemmas posed by new peak demand times and crowded areas in need of more electrons.

One of those dilemmas is rising winter energy needs. Even though seasonal temperatures are rising, peak demand has gone from summer to winter on the East Coast as a result of the increasing electrification of heating. Offshore wind produces “its highest output during extreme cold events,” meaning it’s particularly suited to provide power during the winter when the grid is stressed.

“Risks are shifting increasingly to winter from historical periods of summer stress, given the way the grid mix is evolving,” Oliver Stover, an associate principal with Charles River Associates, said in a webinar on the report. “On the East Coast, wind often blows the hardest on those really cold days, which is a really nice synergy.”

And as data centers and AI-powered load growth increases, the report presented offshore wind as a supplemental energy generation solution that doesn’t require much space, which is limited in “coastal load centers” like New England, Virginia, and New York.

All that said, offshore wind isn’t a silver bullet for the energy demand crisis—it’s “an additional and complementary pathway to add new generation,” the report said. Additionally, there’s a relatively small window for offshore wind to be a cost-competitive addition to the grid, as its efficacy is “expected to decline with greater penetration.”

But in the immediate future, many offshore wind projects are already “in advanced stages of construction and development,” Stover said, meaning they could be deployed quickly—and soon—should permitting obstacles from the Trump administration resolve.