The American Clean Power Association (ACP) Offshore Compliance Recommended Practices: 2022 Edition (OCRP-1-2022) received approval earlier this summer from the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) Board of Standards Review, the lead organization that oversees standards and conformity assessment activities in the United States.
The approved document represents the culmination of a five-year effort by an industry-based standards initiative formed in 2017 under the ACP Offshore Wind Subcommittee chaired by Walt Musial, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) offshore wind research lead.
“OCRP-1-2022 establishes a strong precedent for U.S. industry cooperation that I sincerely believe will help accelerate the U.S. offshore wind energy industry and our nation’s push to decarbonize energy use,” Musial said. “This could become one of the primary guidance documents for the development of offshore wind energy on the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf and could lead to shorter regulatory timelines and increased worker safety.”
The U.S. Offshore Wind Standards Initiative is a collaboration led by NREL, the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the U.S. Department of Energy, the Business Network for Offshore Wind, ACP, and ANSI. The subcommittee comprises more than 300 members from various offshore wind industry sectors.
To Understand This We Have To Go Back To Year 2021 When Joe Biden Announced The Vision Regarding This
Last Year, the Joe Biden administration laid out plans to accelerate the nation’s transition to carbon neutrality by facilitating the development of wind farms in coastal waters off the United States. With several advantages over land-based turbines, a thriving offshore wind industry has the potential to drive job growth while advancing President Biden’s decarbonization strategy.
The country’s first commercial offshore wind farm, Vineyard Wind, located off the Massachusetts island of Martha’s Vineyard, received federal approval in May and started construction in November. The project is expected to start generating power in 2023. The Interior Department is aiming to lease federal waters along the Atlantic, Gulf, and Pacific coasts for more than a dozen projects by 2025.
How will offshore wind help the U.S. meet its climate goals?
As part of its renewed commitment to the Paris Agreement, the Biden administration has pledged to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by half of its 2005 levels by 2030, and it views scaling up offshore wind power as a critical step on the path toward that goal.
The plan is to have U.S. offshore wind farms producing thirty gigawatts of energy by 2030, enough to power more than ten million homes. Today, U.S. offshore wind production is negligible, at less than 1 percent of the administration’s target. Experts say that meeting this renewable energy goal will prevent the release of seventy-eight million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions over that time period.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimates that the technical resource potential for U.S. offshore wind is more than two thousand gigawatts. Biden hopes to unlock more than one hundred gigawatts of that capacity by 2050.
Offshore wind farms have the potential to produce more electricity than onshore projects due to the generally stronger, more consistent winds at sea. Moreover, developing wind farms along the extensive U.S. coastline can help meet the electricity demand in areas with high population density and where available land is scarce.
How does United States Own wind power compare to that of other countries?
The United States is a global leader in onshore wind power—second only to China in capacity [PDF] as of 2020—but it lags behind many of its peers in offshore capacity. Coastal European nations and China have led the way: the United Kingdom is the world’s largest operator of installed offshore wind capacity, while China is leading in the construction of new offshore wind installations for the third consecutive year.
Pointing to more than 200 existing industry standards and guidelines focused on the requirements for the development of a U.S. offshore wind energy project, OCRP-1-2022 covers all stages of offshore wind farm development—including design, manufacturing and fabrication, transportation and installation, operations and in-service inspections, and life-cycle planning.
“These recommended practices cover a broader scope than anything previously available to the offshore wind energy industry,” Musial said. “Although OCRP-1-2022 leans heavily on the International Electrotechnical Commission’s standards, it covers the entire life cycle of the project, from design of the turbine and substructure to end-of-life decommissioning. Regulators hold responsibility for all stages of development—from cradle to grave—and we’ve now provided them more comprehensive guidance in one document.”
OCRP-1-2022 is the first of five documents to be published and was written by a consensus-based group of more than 100 offshore wind energy industry members, co-chaired by Rain Byars, the technical and delivery director for Atlantic Shores Offshore Wind (a partnership between Shell New Energies US LLC and EDF Renewables North America) and Graham Cranston, a DNV project manager and principal structural engineer.
“OCRP-1-2022 is an essential component to meeting the goal, providing common guidance, removing guesswork, and enabling required federal permitting design documents to be more quickly developed. This should help reduce overall permitting timeframes and put turbines in the water faster to help avert the climate crisis”, Burdock said.