America’s Great Lakes should be a perfect location for offshore wind. They have large ports, strong winds, excellent grid connections and a huge amount of potential energy demand — 29 million people live along or near their shores, including huge load centres such as Chicago, Detroit and Cleveland.
So why does an offshore wind industry off the US “North Coast” seem such a long way away?
“The biggest challenge the industry has is that we don’t have a project [in operation] yet,” says Lorry Wagner, president of the non-profit Lake Erie Energy Development Corp (LEEDCo) — the developer of the pioneering 21.7MW
