The US Wind Controversy In Maryland: Project Survival At Stake

OCEAN CITY, NEW JERSEY – July 15: A sign placed by Protect Our Coast reads “stop windmills; save our shore” on the day of their protest against the installation of wind turbines at the beach in Ocean City, New Jersey on July 15, 2023. (Photo by Rachel Wisniewski/For the Washington Post)

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Across the East Coast, opposition to offshore wind energy is turning into a cultural identity. From Ocean City, Maryland to coastal Delaware and New Jersey, once slated for a major offshore wind development, resistance is gaining traction. The opposition continues to perpetuate false narratives about purported harms to whales and dolphins, undeterred by the lack of scientific evidence. All the while, supporters are less visible and mostly quiet about their preferences. With “Stop Windmills” bumper stickers, storefront signs, and even beachside lemonade stands, the message is clear. This is not just a protest against turbines, it is a cultural stand, a way of building walls against change.

US Wind Project Delayed Through Litigation

The latest skirmish comes from Ocean City and Worcester County. In early July, Ocean City and Worcester County jointly filed two legal appeals against US Wind’s air permit, claiming that the Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE), a state agency, issued the permit without following proper procedures. One appeal was filed with the EPA’s Environmental Appeals Board, and the other in the Worcester County Circuit Court. Jurisdiction over the permit is unclear, so both a federal and a state agency were petitioned. Prior to that, another federal regulator, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, had already approved the project’s Environmental Impact Statement, complete with mitigation measures.

Many objections to US Wind’s air permit are procedural, such as failure to provide public notice on permit provisions or failure to issue a permit within a year after the application was deemed complete. However, two complaints were more substantive. One referred to the failure to conduct a required alternatives analysis. The other was the failure to calculate boat emissions from the vessels shuttling workers to turbines located 11 miles offshore, a distance so far that the turbines are barely visible from land. Given the number of commercial and recreational boats currently active in the region, it is interesting that the service boats for a wind project were singled out as a topic for complaint.

As for the required alternatives analysis, the city and county do not seem to see the bigger picture. The question is not whether there will be a wind project in coastal waters or not. The question is how the region is going to secure its electricity supply if projects like US Wind keep being delayed.

Local Electricity Production Helps Electric Grid

Electricity markets across the country are facing growing challenges in reliably meeting demand. The Delmarva region is part of PJM, a regional transmission organization that manages the high-voltage power grid and wholesale electricity markets across 13 states and Washington, D.C. In PJM’s most recent capacity auction, the clearing price hit a record high of $329 per megawatt-day. This signals a long-term need for more available power sources to keep the grid stable.

While capacity markets were originally designed with on-demand, dispatchable power plants in mind, like natural gas or coal, renewables and batteries can and do participate. Capacity markets provide payments to energy producers in exchange for committing to be available during times of peak electricity demand.

Wind energy offers another key benefit: it can help strengthen the local power supply. With electricity demand rising across the PJM region, especially from data centers, every new power project built within a county helps reduce pressure on the grid and stabilize prices. This electricity is not being transmitted from hundreds of miles away. It is generated locally, and US Wind would bring 114 turbines to the grid.

Offshore wind, in particular, has an advantage. Thanks to stronger and more consistent winds over the ocean, offshore turbines can generate electricity more reliably throughout the year than turbines on land. That makes them a promising part of the solution for meeting growing energy needs. If they are built, of course.

CVOW Success in Virginia

The history of offshore wind development seems to have many such examples when projects were never built. The earliest example is from 2001, when Jim Gordon began the development of Cape Wind with 130 wind turbines in Nantucket Sound off the coast of Cape Cod. After spending over $100 million and obtaining necessary permits, the project was cancelled in December 2017 due to issues with power purchase agreements, construction financing, and a mounting local opposition funded by Senator Ted Kennedy and William Koch, who liked vacationing on Cape Cod.

Successful offshore wind developments are much rarer. Virginia’s Dominion Energy seems to have pulled it off with their 2.6 GW planned project 24 nautical miles off the coast of Virginia Beach. Once completed, the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind (CVOW) project will be one of the largest offshore wind farms in the world, consisting of 176 Siemens turbines. While the construction is still ongoing, the company announced that 78 monopile foundations, which hold wind turbines, have been installed. In addition to wind turbines, Dominion Energy needs to install substations that handle the flow of electrons from the new source to the existing grid. In January 2025, the first of three offshore substations arrived, weighing 4,000 tonnes, and becoming the heaviest piece of equipment ever handled by the Port of Virginia.

Dominion Energy built its offshore project due to hard work of their teams, as well as existing institutional backing and thousands of stakeholder meetings to address questions over the years. As a state-regulated monopoly with a state Renewable Portfolio Standard to meet, Dominion Energy had the political alignment in Virginia to get the project done. It seems like US Wind is not so lucky. US Wind, a private developer, is being whipsawed between state courts and federal agencies. The result is procedural chaos and mounting delays, which are jeopardizing a private upfront investment.

A Nation That Forgot How to Build

The tragedy here is not the lawsuit. It is the lost learning of building large offshore wind projects. Given that installing each turbine is a modular task: once one turbine is installed, you kind of know how to install the next one. The book How Big Things Get Done explains that this is how big infrastructure scales. This is a reason why modular projects like solar and wind farms are less likely to experience cost and time overruns, once legal hurdles are cleared. We can learn and get better at it over time. Instead, in the U.S., projects are litigated and delayed, often to make the project economics untenable and the investment unrecoverable.

China, meanwhile, has installed the world’s largest turbine off the coast of Taiwan and is building the world’s largest hydropower plant in Tibet, which will make the famous Three Gorges Dam pale in comparison. If energy dominance is still the goal in the U.S., then we should seek to dominate in something beyond long development timelines.

Contrary to the opposition’s narrative, most people support offshore wind. A peer-reviewed study of coastal residents did not find significant opposition to wind power, especially when it is sited farther from the shore. Opinion polls among Americans show that support for wind energy remains strong, although it has declined among Republicans. But the silent majority often gets drowned out by highly organized opponents who dominate the narrative. There is no evidence that wind turbines kill whales or cause dolphin strandings. However, it is certain that, due to ocean acidification and overfishing, apex species are in danger of starving. This is happening because the ocean is absorbing increasing amounts of carbon dioxide and because human activity has disturbed the marine food chains, not because wind developers are using sonar. If marine life were the concern, wind projects would be seen as something to fight for, not against.