by Peter Asmus, Matter Network

Can the United States match words with deeds in its efforts to come clean on the promise of clean energy industries revitalizing both the environment and the U.S. economy?

At an offshore wind power conference held in Boston last week, Michael Bromwich, director of the Bureau of Offshore Energy Management, Regulation, and Enforcement (BOEMRE) promised that the Obama administration is making permit streamlining for offshore wind projects a top priority, even as the same administration tries to clamp down with new safety regulations for the oil and gas industry. What Bromwich didn’t say is that under current regulations, it is actually easier to go offshore with oil and natural gas drilling than it is to site, permit, and build an offshore wind farm. There’s something clearly wrong with that picture.

Under the current regulatory regime, it takes from seven to ten years to permit an offshore wind project and typically less than half of that for an oil or natural gas platform. In November 2010, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar announced simplifications to the permitting process in the “Smart from the Start” initiative. In response, BOEMRE has eliminated the second round of Request for Interest in the permitting process, which is redundant and can delay the permitting process by six months to a year. The goal of the “Smart from the Start” program is to shrink permit approval down to two years, which would translate to a total development cycle of four years.

Furthermore, task forces have been set up in each major offshore wind state along the Atlantic Coast, identifying priority area for development. Publicly funded environmental assessments are also underway so developers can work from shared data sets and steer clear of controversial sites. Some of these states (Delaware, Rhode Island, and New York) are also working to shrink the permitting timeline by adding Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) s to their competitive solicitations.

A recent report from the National Wildlife Federation claims that the entire Atlantic seaboard stretching from Maine to Florida has over 212 GW of available offshore wind resources, with more than half of this potential renewable energy capacity concentrated between New Jersey and North Carolina (119 GW). This estimate already factors in limiting resource assumptions such as environmental and socioeconomic factors.

Along the Eastern seaboard, every state but Connecticut is offering incentives or issuing requests for future bids for offshore wind power. Up to ten GW of offshore wind is possible by 2020 if Atlantic states complied with RPS legal mandates and specific offshore wind development deployment goals. Several new federal permits to build offshore wind facilities are expected over the next couple of years. There is growing interest in the Great Lakes, with Ohio out in the lead. The grand total for actual proposed offshore wind developments along the Atlantic Coast is between 5.3 to 6.5 GW, with the larger figure including planned build-outs of second or third phases of development.