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Offshore Wind Jobs and Economic Development Impacts in the United States: Four Regional Scenarios

Offshore Wind Jobs and Economic Development Impacts in the United States: Four Regional Scenarios

Full Title: Offshore Wind Jobs and Economic Development Impacts in the United States: Four Regional Scenarios
Author(s): S. Tegen, D. Keyser, F. Flores-Espino, J. Miles, D. Loomis, and D. Zammit
Publisher(s): National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL)
Publication Date: February 1, 2015
Full Text: Download Resource
Description (excerpt):

Offshore wind has tremendous potential in the United States as a clean, renewable source of electricity. This report uses the offshore wind Jobs and Economic Development Impacts (JEDI) model1 and provides four case studies of potential offshore wind deployment scenarios in different regions of the United States: the Southeast, the Great Lakes, the Gulf Coast, and the Mid-Atlantic. Researchers worked with developers and industry representatives in each region to create potential offshore wind deployment and supply chain growth scenarios, specific to their locations. These scenarios were used as inputs into the offshore JEDI model to estimate jobs and other gross economic impacts in each region.

Study results show that in addition to being a promising source of electricity, offshore wind also has the potential to drive regional economic development. How significant of a driver depends on how much offshore wind capacity is deployed. Specifically, the results from the four regional case studies describe how and to what extent increased investment in offshore wind technology and labor force development could translate into increased employment in the offshore wind industry.

To obtain the best regional assumptions for this report, the four scenarios (combining deployment, labor force, and regional supply chain development) were constructed specifically for each region, and this affects the analysis results. The scenarios vary in terms of their levels of relative deployment potential as well as assumptions about the local workforce and supply chain. Sourcing components locally reduces transportation costs, times, and risks and increases the economic impacts to the local economy. One study showed that the total construction costs of a hypothetical 588-megawatt (MW) offshore wind farm built off the coast of Virginia with turbines imported from Europe would be 17% more expensive than building the same wind farm with turbines manufactured locally (VCERC 2010).

Differences in the scenarios (e.g., local content assumptions) result in regional economic comparisons that are not “apples to apples.” In other words, it is not appropriate to compare regional results on a dollars- or jobs-per-megawatt basis, given the actual and modeled regional variances. Table ES-1 shows ranges of jobs per megawatt in the four regions we examined, but it cannot be used as a nationwide average due to the variance in regional model inputs, differences in real regional wind conditions, and the fact that all regions of the country were not included.

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