Posted on January 27, 2025
Maine has a fleeting chance to get back in the race in 2025, despite President Trump’s antipathy.
News reports last week detailed President Donald Trump’s efforts to derail offshore wind energy in the United States.
But in an undisclosed location in Trenton, contractors are putting the finishing touches on a 375-ton concrete structure aimed at putting Maine back in the global race to design cost-effective platforms for the next era of ocean energy — commercial, floating offshore wind farms.
Trump’s order to pause federal offshore wind leases and permits won’t stop this effort. If all goes as planned, researchers from the University of Maine will launch the 52-foot wide, quarter-scale concrete hull, with a turbine blade reaching 108 feet above the waterline, later this year off Castine.
It has been 12 years since they tested a one-eighth scale prototype of an earlier UMaine design in the same location. It was hailed then as the first floating wind turbine producing power in North America, and it made Maine a global contender in developing this technology.
Since 2013, though, Maine and the United States have been passed by other countries that have full-scale floating projects at sea and by developers that are ahead in advancing their designs.
As 2025 unfolds, Maine offshore energy ambitions are at a pivotal point. Progress must be made on two fronts this year, participants say, for the state to regain momentum in the global race to advance floating wind technology.
First, Maine must make notable headway in refining the design for commercial-scale floating platforms. These platforms can be as long as a football field and able to support turbines with blade tips 600 feet in the air, moored miles from land. That’s why the in-the-water performance of UMaine’s next-generation technology will draw international interest.
Second, Maine must deploy and test full-size versions of this platform design far offshore, in a so-called research array. After more than two years of negotiations, state regulators are expected this spring to decide if a proposed contract for utilities to buy power from a 12-platform wind farm is in the public interest. The proposed research array, 30 miles off Portland, could be a critical stepping stone to a commercial-scale wind farm in the Gulf of Maine.
Paradoxically, these two imperatives are coming to the fore just as President Donald Trump has ordered a pause to new wind leases and permits in federal waters, reflecting the new administration’s hostile stance on ocean wind power.
Trump’s action is making headlines, but it won’t have a direct effect on Maine. The Castine test site is in state waters. The research array, which secured a federal lease during the Biden years, isn’t expected to be built until at least 2030.
Maine, then, is playing a long game on offshore wind. But its standing with global investors and developers could hinge on what happens with the test hull and research array contract over the next year or so.
Without the contract, Maine will lose its best chance to compete in floating offshore wind, according to Chris Wissemann, chief executive officer of Diamond Offshore Wind, which plans to build the array. Diamond is a subsidiary of Japan’s Mitsubishi Corp., and is part of related subsidiaries called New England Aqua Ventus LLC and Pine Tree Offshore Wind LLC. Diamond has invested $20 million so far pursuing that goal, he said.
“If the research array is not approved early this year,” Wissemann told The Maine Monitor, “Maine’s leadership in offshore wind is lost, I believe, probably forever. The industry will conclude that Maine won’t do anything. Too much time has gone on.”
Floating the quarter-scale model will also signal to developers that UMaine is making important advancements in its design, according to Habib Dagher, director of the school’s Advanced Structures & Composites Center.
“This technology just won a national competition,” Dagher said, referring to a $12.5 million award last summer from the federal Department of Energy. “It’s like going from an iPhone 1 to an iPhone 16. This latest interaction of the technology drives down costs and makes it easier to build.”
Playing the long game
Dagher has spent much of his career trying to put Maine at the forefront of offshore wind development, with mixed results.
Fifteen years ago, he went to Norway to see the world’s first full-scale floating wind turbine, launched in 2009. State officials were courting the Norwegian developer — named Statoil at the time and now Equinor — to build a $120 million demonstration project in the Gulf of Maine.
Meanwhile, Dagher and his team were working on a proprietary design for semi-submersible platforms made of concrete rather than steel — a new idea then. Their work had attracted millions of federal dollars and the interest of the U.S. Energy Secretary, who came to Orono for a tour.
“There’s an international race,” Dagher told the Portland Press Herald during a 2010 visit to the center. “If we can’t pull it off here, these companies will do it somewhere else.”
And that’s exactly what has happened.
Today, a handful of demonstration floating wind farms are in operation — including in Portugal, Norway and Scotland — two of them built by companies once interested in pilot projects in Maine. Several more are being developed or are in various stages of planning, from Europe to Asia to California. More than 20 platform designs have undergone at-sea testing and more than 80 others are under development, according to a 2023 global review by the University of Plymouth in the United Kingdom.
The pace of activity reflects a conviction that floating offshore wind will in time become a major industry, generating trillions of dollars of investment worldwide and hundreds of thousands of jobs.
Maine could gain up to 33,000 short-term and 13,000 long-term jobs over a 20-year period from development in the Gulf of Maine, according to a 2022 analysis done for the Governor’s Energy Office and the Maine Offshore Wind Roadmap. The question now is whether the UMaine platform and the research array can position Maine to reap some of the economic rewards.
Large cranes at the port of Dundee, Scotland, assemble Principle Power’s wind farm platforms, which measure 219 feet across and support turbine towers 328 feet high. The steel platforms form the company’s 48-megawatt Kincardine offshore wind farm in Scotland, launched in 2021.
The UMaine team believes its second iteration, named VolturnUS+, is superior to competing steel hull designs. Compared to semi-submersible competitors, it’s 20-30% smaller and can be deployed in shallower harbors, researchers say.
It’s lighter and cheaper to build. It features patented technology to dampen the motion of the hull when it’s slammed by 50-foot waves and is strong enough to support today’s largest wind turbines, up to 15 megawatts. VolturnUS+ will be connected to the grid with a 225-kilowatt turbine.
Dagher declined to specify who’s building the hull or exactly where in Trenton, saying he wanted to wait until it’s complete.
If the quarter-size hull performs as designed, up to a dozen full-size versions could be tested at a lease site in federal waters with a so-called research array, some time after 2030. The wind farm would generate electricity — with up to 144 megawatts of capacity — that would flow to the mainland grid via a subsea cable.
Maine has a lot riding on the research array, meant to test both the performance and environmental impacts at sea. Drawn out negotiations over a power purchase contract are coming to a head and expected to be reviewed in the coming months by the Public Utilities Commission.
Among other things, regulators must determine whether the project can be built for the “lowest reasonable cost,” as required by law, and how that translates into the price of the power for electricity customers. It’s widely understood that the rate will be above today’s market prices. How much higher isn’t known, but the PUC may have to gamble that it will become a worthwhile investment for residents and businesses, even as many are being squeezed by rising rates today.
“We have Diamond saying, ‘if we don’t get these terms, we won’t go forward, because we can’t finance the project,’ ” said Bill Harwood, Maine’s Public Advocate. “That’s not competitive bidding.”
On the other hand, Harwood said, Maine can’t phase out fossil fuels and meet its climate goals without offshore wind. So it’s important to get a project built to test performance and assess the impact on fishing and the marine environment.
Conventional offshore wind farms were pioneered in Europe in the 1990s and feature towers sunk into shallow seabeds. Today they are being built along the U.S. East Coast, from Massachusetts to Virginia. Eleven commercial-scale projects were approved under the Biden administration, which said they will have enough power capacity to serve six million homes.
By contrast, floating wind turbines are located far offshore, where winds are steadier and stronger. The Gulf of Maine is considered a prime location because of its deep-but-not-too-deep coastline and proximity to East Coast population centers that need increasing amounts of electricity.
Advocates are banking on the research array becoming the first floating offshore wind farm in the United States. It would establish Maine “as a clear leader in a fast-growing industry,” according to comments last year to the PUC by a group of Democratic legislators. But a counterpoint written by a handful of Republicans said the array would saddle electric customers with high rates and damage the marine environment and fishing economy.
The value proposition is top of mind for the PUC commissioners, who questioned representatives of Pine Tree Offshore Wind last summer during a fact-finding session. The case is expected to wrap up soon, possibly with a long-term contract proposal by March 31.
“Presumably,” Commissioner Patrick Scully said last summer, “some of the reason that the Legislature felt it was appropriate for ratepayers to bear the cost of this research array was that it would essentially jump start an industry. But what happens if the industry is essentially already here and so many of the benefits that the statute articulates aren’t really provided by this research array because the industry’s already full steam ahead?”
That shouldn’t be a big concern, Wissemann replied, because the pace of development is slower than recent lease announcements would indicate. The near-shore projects being built off Massachusetts and New York are at lease sites approved a decade ago, he noted. Floating wind is on a similar timeline.
“Big projects are not going to be built until solidly into the 2030s,” Wissemann said. “And so there’s a lot of daylight between this project and the lessons learned.”
That timeline may now get longer. Following unprecedented expansion during the Biden years, offshore wind energy in America has lost federal support.
Trump’s disdain for wind power is well known, ever since he lost a 2015 attempt to keep an offshore wind farm from being built near his luxury golf course in Scotland. Lease permits in federal waters were slow-walked during his first administration. The pause announced by Trump last week bolsters his campaign vow to kill offshore wind development during his second term.
Trump’s opposition is good news for wind opponents, including many commercial fishermen and coastal residents who feel wind farms miles from shore will impact their livelihoods or lives. But it’s also a gift to America’s ocean energy competitors, such as those building in the UK. It gives them a leg up over the next four years or more to roll out technologies that lower the cost and boost the performance of floating offshore wind.
A parallel race for ports, supply chains
The Trump years also may slow development of the specialized ports needed to stage and assemble the components for floating wind. They must include deep water and enough space to fabricate platforms up to 300 feet long. Also essential is a supply chain to provision the industry and the labor force to make it all happen. That’s why there also has been a parallel race underway to build this infrastructure and train the workforce.
Maine has largely been a spectator in this race, as other states are already putting supply chains in place and building ports to serve the growing near-shore industry. Some of these components could have future applications for floating wind.
Examples of these supply chain links and the thousands of jobs they are creating are highlighted in a recent publication from Oceantic Network, an industry trade group, called Offshore Energy at Work.
The glossy, 60-page publication was released five days before Trump’s inauguration. It chronicles $25 billion in new supply chain investments in 40 states, 57% of them in Republican districts. The work includes launching 33 new or retrofitted vessels from 22 shipyards in 12 states as far south as Texas and Louisiana, with 25 more ships on order.
A related video shows companies across New York State manufacturing components for South Fork Wind and Sunrise Wind, off Long Island. It profiled firms in upstate New York performing tasks from building steel and concrete platforms to making electrical systems.
Other parts, such as turbines, will be shipped out of New London, Connecticut, where part of the port has been redeveloped into a staging and assembling site. It complements New Bedford, Massachusetts, America’s first offshore wind terminal, which has been the so-called marshalling port for the Vineyard Wind 1 project off Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard.
Maine losing the port race
Maine, meanwhile, is mired in a long-running debate over where to develop an offshore wind port — Mack Point, an existing industrial port in Searsport, or adjacent Sears Island, an undeveloped state-owned island linked by a causeway.
Last year, the state lost out on a $456 million federal grant to offset the estimated $760 million cost of developing Sears Island, the preferred site of the administration of Gov. Janet Mills.
It was the fourth grant rejection, and it calls into question whether the federal government — even during the wind-friendly Biden era — sees a need for a dedicated wind port at Sears Island, according to a recent article in Midcoast Villager.
Meanwhile, construction is underway in Salem, Massachusetts to convert a former oil and coal-fired power plant site into the region’s largest offshore port. The $300 million terminal will initially serve near-shore projects. Its footprint is too small and the harbor’s too congested to fabricate the huge floating platforms, Wissemann said, but Salem could “stage” floating wind, such as offloading turbines from ships.
Salem also may be better positioned to service potential projects at two floating lease sites auctioned last October by the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. One of the sites, won by Avangrid Renewables, is 30 miles off Massachusetts. The second, won by Invenergy NE Offshore Wind, is 22 miles.
Offshore wind leases in the Gulf of Maine.
Competition also is shaping up on the West Coast, which has a deeper coastline that will require floating platforms with complex mooring systems. Last July, the California Energy Commission approved a multi-billion dollar plan to develop a floating offshore industry centered near Humboldt and Morro bays.
Humboldt Bay received a $426 million federal grant last year to help build a floating offshore construction and maintenance terminal, winning money from the same program that turned down Maine’s request for Sears Island.
Northern California officials plan to work with the port of Long Beach, near Los Angeles, which already has committed millions of dollars to develop Pier Wind, a proposed 400-acre terminal to assemble and deploy floating turbines as tall as a 70-story building. Meanwhile, developers including Equinor have proposed floating projects in California, including in state waters, that are on timelines similar to Maine’s research array.
What does it mean to lead?
All these events have some experts pondering Maine’s role in the race for floating offshore wind.
What does it really mean to lead, asked Patrick Woodcock, president of the Maine State Chamber of Commerce. Does it mean to lead on technology? Lead on first-in-the-nation deployment? Lead on contribution to the state’s economy?
“Was it really realistic for Maine to lead in this new industry?” Woodcock asked. “What components of this vision are the highest priority and the most realistic for the state now?”
Woodcock, who was the state’s energy office director under Gov. Paul LePage until 2016, and then commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources, said perspective is important.
After decades of growth in Europe, the economics of fixed-bottom offshore wind took off in the United States, driven by politics, yes, but also unexpected tech innovations that have produced massive turbines with unprecedented generating capacity.
But costs are volatile. For instance: Danish developer Orsted last week reported a $1.7 billion earnings loss in its U.S. offshore wind business, burdened largely by construction costs and delays with its 924-megawatt Sunrise Wind farm off New York.
“It remains to be seen what’s a realistic timeline for floating development in the United States,” Woodcock said.
Despite today’s challenging economics and politics, Maine has a chance in 2025 to reinsert itself into the conversation about where floating wind is headed, at least in the Gulf of Maine.
But it remains to be seen how or if UMaine’s technology, the research array or a Maine port will influence the eventual shape of the industry here, in the view of Francis Pullaro, president of RENEW Northeast, a clean energy trade group.
“We’re really just at the start of this,” Pullaro said of floating wind. “There are going to be multiple administrations over the next 10 years in Washington and the states. It’s going to take vision to see it through. And it’s going to take patience.”
