States up and down the US East Coast have finally caught on to the enormous potential of the jobs-rich offshore wind market, and the good news is jobs are coming soon.

But behind the recent flurry of big US offshore announcements lurks a worrisome tension. The fact is there simply won’t be enough factories and hard-hat jobs to satisfy every state’s ambitions for the sector, and some will end up disappointed.

It’s an important source of risk in a market still reliant on political support, for which the stars otherwise seem to be aligning.

For a sector that’s moved at a snail’s pace for much of the past decade, the US offshore wind market has suddenly begun accelerating – from lofty bids for prime development zones off states like New York to the 1.4GW of collective procurements seen in New England over the past few weeks.

The question is no longer whether the market will take off. What the industry is watching for now is where the jobs will be created and just how competitive the sector will be on cost. And those two points are inextricably linked.

The supply chain can fan out to please as many states as possible. Or it can think more strategically, and take a regional approach that focuses on developing economies of scale, helping to bring costs down as quickly as possible.

Right now, the first scenario seems to be playing out. Every state that’s procured offshore wind so far, from Maryland up through Massachusetts, has leaned heavily on developers to create local jobs, and developers have been willing to oblige them.

If state officials have their way, there will soon be multiple East Coast offshore wind hubs, from Baltimore to Paulsboro, Brooklyn to New London – perhaps all the way up to Maine (or even Atlantic Canada).

Similar cries for jobs were heard across Europe as that market scaled up, notes Alejandro de Hoz, vice president for US offshore wind at Avangrid Renewables.

The critical difference, Hoz told an industry conference recently, is the European supply chain was pressured to spread out among a handful of different countries, each on its way to multi-gigawatt build-outs. “In the US we’re seeing content requirements per state,” he says.

It doesn’t stop with states that have actually moved to procure offshore wind. Even those that have not yet done so, or in some cases even established a target, are counting on photogenic jobs coming their way.

Look at Virginia, which has a two-turbine demonstration project under development off its coast, but which is now touting itself as “the prime location for the offshore wind industry”.

The biggest supply chain investment decisions are likely still years away in the US, but even now the figures involved are impressively large. Take Deepwater Wind, which is developing projects for an unprecedented four states following its 200MW win last week in Connecticut.

In Maryland, Deepwater and fellow developer US Wind are required to spend more than $100m on a steel fabrication plant and port upgrades. Meanwhile, Deepwater has pledged to invest $250m in Rhode Island, covering a broad array of work related to its 400MW project there, and it will spend millions more upgrading port facilities in New London, Connecticut.

At times, the offshore wind power itself almost starts to feel secondary.

Discussing New Jersey’s Offshore Wind Economic Development Act, Kenneth Sheehan, director of economic development and emerging technologies at New Jersey’s Board of Public Utilities, says: “The ‘Economic Development Act’ side is perhaps just as important as the ‘Offshore Wind’ side from New Jersey’s point of view.”

New Jersey is “desperate, in the best sense of the word, to have development of the [offshore] supply chain”, Sheehan says.

The potential danger in all this is obvious. Spreading the supply chain too thin, across too many states – including those with less-than-ideal locations or inadequate local infrastructure – could result in an inefficient industry with unnecessarily inflated prices.

At the same time, telling state lawmakers to support a still-pricey electricity source whose jobs will accrue to neighbouring states – or worse, to Europe – is not an argument the industry is eager to put forward.

Not everyone is concerned about the current scramble for jobs. “I think there’s going to be plenty to go around,” Joe Martens, director of the New York Offshore Wind Alliance, tells Recharge.

“I think it’s almost overblown in a way,” Martens says. “The marketplace will work this out.”

The optimistic long-horizon view is that pressure for local jobs will fade after the first round of big projects moves into the water and the industry begins to mature.

But for now, the tension is very much there, leaving developers and potential supply-chain participants to walk a slippery line.

“At this point, every state is frankly in it for itself,” says Steve Pike, chief executive of the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, which operates the state’s Marine Commerce Terminal in New Bedford.

At some point, Pike says, “the supply chain will have to push back, and set us all straight”.

Wind

Jobs tension hangs over US offshore wind market