Bloomberg Environment

 Deepwater Wind CEO urges offshore wind industry to develop incrementally in U.S. to
ensure local support
 Denmark-based Orsted’s strategy is to build large-scale offshore wind farms

Offshore wind developers shouldn’t think too big when planning new wind farms in U.S. waters
because if the projects are too large they may drive away potential supporters, the developer of
America’s only offshore wind farm warned April 4.

“Let’s not rush to gargantuan projects,” Jeffrey Grybowski, CEO of Deepwater Wind, said at
the International Offshore Wind Partnering Forum in Princeton, N.J.

Deepwater Wind completed North America’s first offshore wind farm, the five-turbine, 30-
megawatt Block Island Wind Farm in Rhode Island, in 2016 after eight years of difficult
permitting and legal challenges, he said.

“Let’s not naively assume we can make massive leaps from small to gargantuan,” he said. “Let’s
make sure that we’re approaching offshore wind in a way that each project is incrementally
better than the last.”

Enthusiasm for wide-scale offshore wind development is high in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic
as European companies such as Orsted A/S and Statoil ASA clamber to build wind farms
hundreds of megawatts each off the East Coast.

Going Big

Several states, among them New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, see offshore wind farms
as a brand-new industry that can help create jobs and cut greenhouse gas emissions.
“This is going to be our all-in attempt to combat climate change,” New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy
(D), who wants to see the state producing 3,500 megawatts of offshore wind power by 2030, said
at the forum. “We’ll send a clear signal that we don’t want [oil] drilling off our coast, but what
we do want are wind turbines.”

Orsted, one of the largest European offshore wind developers entering the U.S. market, has plans
to build wind farms in three states, including the Ocean Wind project in New Jersey, which could
eventually grow to 1,000 megawatts.

“I cannot sort of relate to the statement of saying that you want to start more staged and more
small-scale,” Martin Neubert, CEO of Denmark-based Orsted Wind, told Bloomberg
Environment. “You want to go big.”

The size of an offshore wind farm proposal is irrelevant to the company’s ability to win over
local governments and interest groups, Neubert said. His company’s overseas wind farms include
a 400-megawatt project in Denmark and a 630-megawatt farm in the U.K.

“You are going to face these interactions with stakeholders whether you build a 200-megawatt
wind farm or an 800-megawatt wind farm,” he said.

A Conservative Approach

Grybowski urged a conservative approach to offshore wind development as New Jersey, New
York. and Massachusetts have plans to build a total of 7.5 gigawatts of offshore wind generating
capacity by 2030, with European companies heavily involved.

But building offshore wind farms in the U.S. is dramatically more complex than in European
countries, which generally lack the numerous layers of local, state and federal governments and
stakeholder groups that often must approve a project, Grybowski said.

New Jersey’s target is reasonable if wind farms are built in phases, he said.

Building smaller wind farms at a slower pace can win over local governments and stakeholder
groups such as fishermen who feel threatened and overwhelmed by plans for offshore wind
farms, he said.

“Europeans have been building offshore wind farms for a long time, so they would prefer to
proceed at a very rapid, very huge scale because that’s where the marketplace is today,”
Grybowski told Bloomberg Environment. “Many folks in the U.S. who are stakeholders are
looking for a different approach.”