Posted on October 9, 2024
Louisiana’s push to capitalize on wind energy has not yet completely caught sail, but officials hope a recent trip to Germany and renewed efforts with industry and education could help chart the course ahead.
A group of Louisiana politicians and business leaders toured Germany in September to study the European nation’s pioneering success in offshore wind. During the trip, led by planning and policy nonprofit CPEX, Louisiana leaders met with officials leading Germany’s energy transition, visited wind facilities around the country, and discussed the offshore wind landscape in the United States with federal officials.
“We learned that wind energy in Germany is integral to all of their operations. It’s a function of economic vitality and critical to their infrastructure,” Public Service Commissioner Davante Lewis said in a statement. “From their port to their government buildings, they’re all in.”
Last December, two foreign companies agreed to build offshore wind farms in Louisiana state waters off the coast of Cameron parish and Terrebonne and Lafourche parishes. And a third company, German energy firm RWE, won the rights to develop a project in federal waters south of Lake Charles.
Zac Lemoine, the government affairs lead at CPEX, said much of the trip involved strategizing how Louisiana industries could leverage the state’s experience in offshore oil and gas to play an important role in the global wind sector.
‘Elephant in the room’
Louisiana has a host of environmental and economic advantages when it comes to building out its offshore wind industry, including shallow water depth in the Gulf, robust offshore energy infrastructure and a skilled workforce in oil and gas. According to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the state ranks fourth in technical potential for the renewable industry.
The Gwynt y Mor Irish Sea wind farm. Louisiana hopes to learn from the success of European nations in developing wind power.
Those pushing for offshore wind in state waters note that the prospective projects are unlikely to power millions of homes, but the smaller-scale operations can still lower transmission costs and power the production of ‘green hydrogen,’ a lower-emissions fuel. For scale, the RWE lease in federal waters exceeds 100,000 acres while the leases in state waters are around 60,000 acres and 6,000 acres.
But progress has recently stalled when it comes to bringing offshore wind to the Louisiana Gulf. At the first meeting for the Louisiana Offshore Wind Roadmap – a new effort to create a plan for the industry over the next couple of years – an advisor with the consultancy firm helping to lead the initiative described the lack of recent competitive interest as the “elephant in the room.”
Factors like low wind speeds, hurricane risk and the state’s reluctance to regulate utilities to tap into the sector pose challenges for the burgeoning industry, consultants for the wind roadmap explained.
Map of an offshore wind development area west of Port Fourchon that Louisiana recently granted to Mitsubishi-owned Diamond Offshore Wind.
Some of these challenges are pushing Louisiana leaders in the sector to look at the industry from a wider perspective, such as educational training programs, manufacturing roles and supply chain opportunities.
“It’s much broader than hooking up a turbine in the Gulf of Mexico,” Lemoine explained.
Educational training
On the trip to Germany, the group toured a facility for Relyon Nutec, a company that focuses on safety trainings for both renewables and traditional energy. The firm has facilities in Houma and Lafayette, which focus on safety for oil and gas, whereas the one in Germany focuses on offshore wind.
“There’s so much translation between offshore oil and gas and offshore wind,” Lemoine said. “We had a conversation about whether there was an opportunity to do tweaking or retooling at the Louisiana facilities so that some offshore wind components could be included, and the answer was, ‘if there’s a need, they can do it.’”
The translation between the two industries was already seen when Louisiana oil and gas workers built the first wind farm in the United States off the coast of Rhode Island in 2021.
And now, wind initiatives at colleges and universities are cropping up around the state. Nunez Community College launched a program this fall training students for entry-level turbine technicians within the wind industry. Delgado Community College is partnering with a Washington, D.C.-based institute to develop a clean energy training program, with the goal of providing manufacturing professionals with skills such as wind tower and turbine wielding.
The Block Island Wind Farm near Rhode Island takes a beating from waves in 2016. The wind farm was the first to operate in U.S. waters. Several Louisiana companies with roots in the offshore oil and gas industry helped design and build the farm.
Last year, Louisiana State University’s offshore wind consortium was named one of 31 nationwide “tech hubs” for manufacturing revitalization and job creation, authorized by the 2022 Chips and Science Act.
“I think that there’s so much at our colleges and universities that will be very applicable to the work that we’re doing and also continues to highlight not only our material expertise but our knowledge expertise,” Lemoine said.
‘All of the above’
Despite the recent slowdown in offshore wind buzz, Chett Chiasson, the executive director of Port Fourchon, says he is optimistic about the future of the industry. The 6,000-acre lease in state waters sits three miles from the jetties of Port Fourchon pass, positioning the port as the base for construction and daily services.
An onshore wind and data collection turbine is scheduled to be operating at the port sometime next year, a project run by Gulf Wind Technology.
“In the grand scheme of things, it’s pretty small,” Chiasson said, noting that the turbine will extend 187 feet from its base and create around 200 to 300 KW of power.
The turbine will collect data such as wind speeds and wind impacts on the blades. In turn, the port plans to power its operations center and maintenance shop.
For Chiasson, these wind efforts are part of the “all of the above” energy plan as the port, which almost entirely services the traditional energy sector, looks not only to renewables but also to the state’s booming LNG industry.
“We’re not transitioning,” he said. “We’re having an energy addition. We’re adding other forms of energy because we need more energy.”
