Offshore Wind Proposal Doesn’t Pencil Out for New Jersey State Regulators

James M. O’Neill reports on the latest setback for a project that would build a 25-megawatt wind farm three miles offshore from Atlantic City. New Jersey’s Board of Public Works unanimously rejected the financial plan for the project by Fishermen’s Energy, a Cape May-based group of commercial fishermen. The project’s financial plan “was based on an expectation of receiving about $100 million in federal grants and tax breaks. The group projected it could complete the project and recoup the cost of financing if it also received financial credits – called Offshore Wind Renewable Energy Certificates, or ORECs — from the state worth $199 for each megawatt hour of energy it produced.”

The board, however, “argued that without that $100 million, the project would need to receive ORECs from the state of $263 per megawatt hour to be viable.” At that price, “[the] project would therefore fail one of the basic tests for approval – providing net benefits to ratepayers.”