On World Oceans Day, a U.S. Plan for Wind

The Obama Administration has launched a new initiative to "jumpstart the offshore wind industry."

Speaking on World Oceans Day at the opening of this year's Capitol Hill Ocean Week, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced the signing of a memorandum of understanding with the governors of ten Atlantic states -- Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina -- to create an offshore wind energy consortium.

The purpose of the consortium is to develop a "coherent, coordinated" program of wind energy along the eastern seaboard;  to help implement that program, the Department of the Interior will establish an office, based in Virginia, that will "be dedicated to doing nothing but work on renewable energy in the Atlantic."

Salazar said that Cape Wind  - the first offshore wind farm in the United States, to be located in Nantucket Sound - "will hopefully become the project that shows we can develop wind energy along the outer continental shelf." Salazar announced his approval of Cape Wind in April, after a near-decade-long review; it is partly to streamline that review process, said Salazar, that the consortium has been developed.

"Our view is that there is great potential for offshore wind energy in many places, particularly in the Atlantic," he said. "Some states along the Atlantic believe 35 to 40 percent of their energy could come from wind energy."

The theme of Capitol Hill Ocean Week, organized by the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation, is "Clean Energy and a Healthy Ocean"; the event's agenda includes several panel discussions based around the consequences of energy use and development for ocean and coastal resources. The theme, and the agenda, were selected months ago, but recent events in the Gulf of Mexico have cast an inevitable shadow over them, even while making them all the more relevant.

Salazar defended the Administration's efforts to limit the damage from the Deepwater Horizon incident, pointing out that his department has 700 employees, including 400 biologists, on site. "We will do everything in our power to bring this problem to an arrest," he insisted.

But he did not shy from using the incident as a rallying cry for the development of energy sources other than gas and oil, of which his coastal wind energy plan is but one element.

"The oil spill tells us in a very clear way that our over-dependence on fossil fuels is an issue we must grapple with as a world and as a nation," he asserted. "We must move away from our over-dependence on fossil fuels because our national security requires us to, because our national economy requires us to, and because the future of the planet requires us to."

Photo: Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar gives the opening keynote at Capitol Hill Ocean Week 2010. Credit: Eddie Arrossi