Is an Offshore Wind Farm in Maryland's Future?

Here's a picture of what may one day soon arrive off our Maryland coast, 11 miles out from the beaches of Ocean City:

It's an offshore wind farm. The propeller-like things are wind turbines. When the wind blows, the blades turn, generating electricity.

Electric power from the wind sends no carbon into the atmosphere and so does not contribute to global warming. It's a renewable, indeed eternal, source of electricity. But it's not presently as cheap as, say, burning coal to power our light bulbs, heating, air conditioning, and the like.

One reason wind power is relatively expensive is that technologies to harness it are new. They have not yet moved "down the cost curve" to the degree experts expect over time.

So building an offshore wind farm today is costly ... and also risky, in that the market for wind power may fail to develop the way experts hope. Yet the only way to move wind power down the cost curve is to invest in it. Building wind farms will, over time, lower the costs of building more wind farms.

Maryland governor
Martin O'Malley

Maryland's Democratic governor, Martin O'Malley, thinks the costs and risks of building wind farms are tolerable even now, with governmental help. He'll be introducing legislation in this state's upcoming General Assembly session that, according to this recent article in The Washington Post, would increase the monthly electric bills of "ratepayers to help cover the cost of making offshore wind energy competitive."

A similar "measure to subsidize development of a multibillion-dollar offshore wind farm" which Gov. O'Malley introduced last year, says the article, "would have added a couple of extra dollars to every Marylander’s monthly electric bill for 20 years and thousands onto those of the state’s largest businesses."

The details of this year's modified proposal have not yet been released, but it appears to embrace a different mechanism for generating the intended financial subsidies. Accordingly:

The new plan would increase ratepayers’ bills, perhaps by an amount nearly equal to what last year’s plan would have, but in a way that would obfuscate such costs, experts said. The credits would not appear as a line-item charge but would be factored into the overall price of electricity sold in the state, raising base electric rates charged to Maryland customers.

I am a strong supporter of Gov. O'Malley in this. I feel that there is no better time for "green-energy" initiatives than now. My reasons:

1. They'll help wean us off fossil fuels in general.
2. They'll help end reliance on foreign oil in particular.
3. They'll help forestall global warming.
4. They'll pollute less in general, creating less acid rain and other harmful effects.
5. They'll use 100% renewable resources, and thus be sustainable into the far future.
6. They'll create a new industry, with permanent new jobs.

It is the creating of new jobs that is the biggest political selling point today, given the sluggish economy and the number of years it would take to get the wind farm up and running. From the point of view of Maryland, these jobs could be a hugely attractive plus for the state. And I imagine another plus factor for Maryland would be that the electric power from the wind farm could, some of it, be sold outside the Free State, thus enriching Maryland's coffers.

Yet the forthcoming O'Malley proposal will be a hard sell to even the governor's fellow Democrats in the state's Senate and House of Delegates. One reason is that the subsidies offered by the state to the wind farm's prospective developers would have to be amplified by sizable federal subsidies to those same developers, mainly in the form of tax credits and loan guarantees.

And those would be harder to come by than they might have been even last year. The general belt-tightening that we saw at the federal level in 2011 in response to the national debt crisis has made Washington largesse much harder to come by now. Add to that today's inflated skepticism about green-energy subsidies in the wake of the Obama administration's much-scorned Solyndra mistake, and you have reason to doubt the necessary federal subsidies would materialize.

I'll be keeping my eye on Gov. O'Malley's wind farm initiative as details become available and as the Maryland General Assembly comes to terms with it.