Roy Presents Wind Plans to Event Sponsored by The Nature Conservancy

In a Thursdsay Zoom webinar sponsored by The Nature Conservancy (TNC) in Massachusetts, Franklin State Rep, Jeff Roy, who is the House Chair of the Massachusetts legislature's telecommunications, utilities and Energy Committee, was the primary speaker

Roy has been very involved in the state’s wind energy program. He was introduced by Steve Long, TNC’s  Director of Government Relations.

A lightly edited transcript of Roy’s remarks follows:

“Thank you so much for the opportunity to be here. I am delighted to talk to you today about Massachusetts and offshore wind. I will say to begin, I was delighted when Speaker Mariano appointed me to this committee, knowing his commitment in all of the great work that he has done to support the development of offshore wind in Massachusetts. It was exciting to get that appointment.

That was February of 2021. And it was right after the inauguration of President Biden who had made significant commitments to offshore wind industry [and]... his national goal of 30 gigawatts along the east coast by 2030. And to be positioned in this space, in the middle of all these great announcements, I was absolutely delighted. And six weeks into my job, as the chair of the committee, we passed the roadmap bill. By March 26 of 2021, we had enacted the roadmap bill and the governor signed it into law.

We raised the procurements up to 5600 megawatts by 2027 and made a commitment of $12 million to offshore wind and other clean energy workforce development. And the key here is that that 5600 megawatts is enough wind to power as many as 2.8 million homes. And that's incredible, but that's just the beginning getting up to 30 gigawatts – it is a noble goal and one we will reach. This wind is going to be key to us reaching our NetZero goals by 2050.

...The lease areas off the coast of Massachusetts, there are seven. Those represent opportunities for 11,000 megawatts of wind energy in terms of gigawatts, that's 11 gigawatts. So that's 1/3, of what President Biden had suggested as the goal. So, we first did the procurement for 800 megawatts. And that's the Vineyard Wind project; that's the first offshore wind project in the contiguous United States. And it's a big moment for the country. But it's also a big moment for Massachusetts, because we're the first state to do a large-scale offshore wind farm in the United States. Number two was the Mayflower wind project. We'll get [that] started as soon as Vineyard Wind is complete. That's another 800 megawatts. And our most recent procurement, the bids were opened in December of 2021, and that's an additional 1200 megawatts.

So, we have approximately 3200 megawatts already procured, and under contract in Massachusetts, we'll the third one is in contract negotiations right now. But we're confident we will get there.

May 11th, was a key date when the federal government approved the Vineyard Wind project. This first project is going to power about 400,000 homes. And to put that into perspective, that's the equivalent of taking 325,000 cars off the road. And our goal is to make Massachusetts a real regional hub for the offshore industry. And this contract alone is going to create 3600 jobs. And that's real exciting for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

On the heels of that announcement on July 16, the nation's first offshore wind project labor agreement was announced. And that was down at the Mass CDC terminal in New Bedford. And as a result of the signing of that project labor agreement, we assured that 500 of the jobs in that first project are going to be union jobs. That particular announcement brought out Gina McCarthy from the White House Senators Warren and Markey and a host of local and state officials and federal officials.

On the heels of that, on November 19 of 2021, we were at the groundbreaking for the nation's first large scale offshore wind project in Barnstable. Shovels are in the ground and that that project is underway. And by the end of next year, you're going to see 62 turbines producing incredible amounts of energy.

When I was appointed by the speaker, one of his first goals and one of the things that he emphasized for me in my role was to take a deep dive on the offshore wind industry and to look at what lessons we have learned and what other states are doing and what other countries are doing. That included meeting with industry representatives, meeting with stakeholders and looking into issues like workforce development, supply chain, transmission procurement, and important infrastructure.

I spent a great deal of time meeting with stakeholders and seeing what's out there on the landscape for offshore wind. And, you know, we had meetings Secretary Moniz was talking to us about, you know, the energy needs, from his perspective, with the Obama administration

There were frequent trips down to New Bedford, to meet with officials and we met with some UK officials such as Peter Abbott. England's been doing offshore wind for 30 years, and he was only too helpful and saying, `Look, we made some mistakes along the way, learn from my mistakes, and we're happy to help you get it right here in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.’

And another interesting piece that we reviewed is a research product out of MIT, which shows what we need to do to meet our net zero goals of 2050. And what all the pieces of the puzzle are. how they impact our ability to keep the Earth from warming and some great technology, developed in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

So as a result of all of this, this work, the next phase for me was the development of a State of Offshore Wind in Massachusetts report with recommendations. We tried to analyze all issues at all levels. And the report ended up coming out at around 100 pages, with graphs and charts. I will tell you that speaker Mariano was delighted to receive the report delighted to read through it. And we had several conversations about where we needed to go next.

We embarked on a trip down to Block Island in Rhode Island, to see a small scale, offshore wind farm, get an up close and personal look at it, talk to some of the folks who develop this get to see what some of the job opportunities were on an offshore wind farm.

And that was a great place to begin to chart the course of where we were going to go in Massachusetts. And The announcement was made this in September of 2021, that our next step was to develop a piece of legislation that puts Massachusetts at the top of the heap in the development of offshore wind.

We can be a leader in the United States; the Speaker of the House is committed to being a leader. So that was a logical next step. In October of 2021, the Governor made his own set of recommendations for things that he and his administration would like to see in an offshore wind proposal. We heard extensive testimony on that bill just last Wednesday, January 11. I will note that there has been widespread industry support for our efforts in this area. And it was a very instructive hearing. I know they're all archived online. If you want to see a great discussion of offshore wind and the potential for offshore wind, I urge you to take a peek at that particular hearing and some of the provisions that the governor was looking for actually did end up in the piece of legislation that we did read out from our committee.

Let me give you some of the highlights from the legislation. It's an act advancing offshore wind and clean energy in Massachusetts. One of the things that we did was to establish an offshore wind industry investment fund. And this is very similar to what we did in the legislature for the life sciences industry many years ago. And by focusing an investment fund and focusing state resources and working and developing a public-private partnership, we did wonders for the life sciences industry. And we wanted to replicate that for the offshore wind industry.

I want to share with you some of the language that I included in the report to the speaker.

Offshore wind is a large and growing source of energy around the world, and is poised for rapid growth in the United States. The technology has improved dramatically, with larger turbines generating much more power and turbines successfully being put much farther from shore and in much deeper water. I already talked about the Biden administration's goal of generating 30 gigawatts of electricity from offshore wind, that's the equivalent of 30 coal fired power plants. And that goal is by 2030. Now, central to this; Massachusetts is uniquely prepared to capitalize on the nation's emerging offshore wind industry and become the Saudi Arabia of offshore wind. According to the Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Massachusetts waters have the largest technical offshore wind potential of any state in the contiguous United States, and has the technical potential to produce more than 1000 terawatt hours of electricity from offshore wind. And as I had indicated earlier, we had already got underway. 5600 megawatts. So, this is an opportunity that comes once in a lifetime for any state.

We need to take advantage of that robust energy that is available off the coast of Massachusetts, we are not well known as a producer or a generator of energy in Massachusetts. We've been exporting energy from outside of the Commonwealth for so many years. But 14 miles off the coast of Martha's Vineyard, we have an opportunity to begin producing clean and reliable energy that will power our needs, as we look in search to achieve our goals of net zero by 2050. So that workforce to offshore wind and the Investment Fund is key to that.

It provides a certification program for offshore wind organizations and will have tax credits and loans and grants to help propel this industry. Grid modernization is key to making all of this work, we're going to produce incredible amounts of energy, but getting it into the grid and getting it from those turbines into the plugs in our homes is a very complex process. And we need some grid modernization planning. So, we have we have included that within the legislation.

Transmission is another piece that's critical and we're looking to solicit some transmission proposals. We envision out in the ocean with hundreds of turbines that you could have a spiderweb of cables running underneath the ocean and we think doing a coordinated transmission program and we're encouraging the administration to do this on a regional basis work with other states to provide transmission that's going to work.

We're also looking at long duration energy storage, battery storage, other forms of storage, production of green high region. These are pieces that are essential to making the wind industry where the wind is going blow at times when we may not need that energy. So, we're going to need a way to store that energy, so it's available to us when we need it.

And finally, we have some education components in that bill, and one that I'll highlight for you now is a DESE pilot, that's Department of Elementary and Secondary Education pilot for offshore wind credential training, we're going to provide financial incentives to our high schools and other organizations to actually get young people engaged and interested in the offshore wind industry. This industry will bring 1000s of jobs to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, it will revolutionize some of the communities that have not done well in other industries. And I highlight New Bedford in that context.

They've already begun with some training facilities at Bristol Community College, Mass Maritime, and UMass Dartmouth.

We want to move on and create some new opportunities because the jobs that exist in this industry, and that are going to be created, have titles that we don't even know today, and we need to prepare a skilled workforce to get into these jobs that will be created. And I think that will give us a competitive advantage with other states in the area.

Pricing has become very competitive. In offshore wind, when we were first talking about this, many years ago, it was in the 15 to 25 cent range per kilowatt. And as you may realize the bids that [now] came in at around the five and six cent range. But we haven't enjoyed as much economic development as we would want. So, we are looking to relax and provide more flexibility on the price cap to encourage some economic development. With changing the selection committee for the bidders, we've heard a lot from folks saying that the utility shouldn't be involved in the selection process, we heard that we came up with a new team to evaluate these bids. And it's much more transparent and I think a fair way to pick these bids.

We are also looking at remuneration issues and asking that the bids maximize economic development. We're looking at environmental and fisheries plans and making some requirements that they provide interest in areas in such as fisheries mitigation, energy storage, interconnection, commitments, allowing municipalities, businesses or nonprofits to take some of the wind energy, we're also looking to get more project labor agreements. So that's part of the bids. And also, what benefits would be available to our environmental justice community.

So that's just an overview of what we have been doing at T UE [The Committee] on offshore wind. And I'm so excited that we have a speaker of the house that views this as a major priority for his service as Speaker of the House. And I couldn't be more excited to be on his team to promote the development of a robust offshore wind industry. And I'm sure you folks at The Nature Conservancy are delighted that we're looking so strongly at clean and reliable forms of energy. So, I'll stop there, and I look forward to our conversation together.

The event continued with a conversation between Representative Roy and Long and audience questions.