Despite encouraging signs of progress in US offshore wind project development, securing permits for the construction of wind farms remains a complex and largely untested topic. An OSW lease auction kicks off a chain of events that could last up to 10 years, including around two years of planning and five years of site assessment and surveys.

This forum will map out the permitting process, analyze lessons learned from the Vineyard Wind 1 project, and provide recommendations for how to streamline the process quickly and efficiently to deliver a project pipeline that will spur further investment in projects, supply chain, infrastructure and workforce.

• Lessons learned from Vineyard Wind permitting experience.
• Identifying and addressing environmental information gaps and collaborating across projects, states, and stakeholders to advance offshore wind.

After years of positive momentum, there is one subject that all commentators on the US offshore wind industry agree on: the sector is going to undergo rapid expansion over the next decade. What does provoke argument is the likely scale of this growth, and the relative importance of the factors that are going to push it forwards or hold it back. We know which policies and investments will elicit offshore wind development. Aggressive procurement targets, competitive procurement strategies, contracting practices, tax support, and transmission access can all ensure offshore wind becomes a boon for US consumers and climate goals. Now it is time to turn the years of positive momentum into movement and accelerate the project pipeline.

In this session, developers and statesman will present actionable solutions to build a sustainable US offshore wind industry and world-leading supply chain.

• A recipe for expansion. Businesses and statesman discuss upfront policy support to scale with rapid cost declines and de-risking offshore wind deployment.
• Building a world-leading OSW supply chain to supercharge US economic growth and job creation.

Your gateway into US offshore wind markets is here. USOW21 will unleash US offshore wind's true potential in 2021, placing it at the heart of America's aggressive green recovery and build-back-better infrastructure plan.

Entering its 6th year, USOW has grown into America's largest networking hub for businesses that are looking to invest, find partners and secure contracts in multi-billion-dollar US offshore wind projects. Moreover, the conference has become the world's stage for industry-defining policy updates on US OCS leasing and permitting activity.

The US offshore wind industry boom, projected to generate nearly 30GW of power in seven East Coast states by 2030, presents a $70 billion CAPEX revenue opportunity to businesses in the U.S. supply chain. However, it doesn't stop there. 2000 GW of offshore wind resource remains untapped.

With such unrealized potential and a clear need for rapid industry expansion under the new Biden administration, this event covers everything you need to know about US offshore wind policy and markets. The event will resolve development bottlenecks and facilitate a multitude of supply chain matchmaking activity. Helping you to meet every major developer, investor, contractor, supplier, manufacturer, policy maker, and key stakeholders.

Finance experts believe US offshore wind will have the best credit quality for renewable energy projects compared to anywhere in the world given their long contracts and similar operational output capacity are like those in Europe. This session will discuss how the perception of risk and risk appetite amongst lenders have changed. Namely risks associated with policy, supply chain, construction, permitting, technology, and market capacity.

• The evolution of US offshore wind financing.
• What is the right balance between regulatory support and regulatory risk to ensure projects complete?
• How supportive are debt markets to provide the billions of dollars of debt financing required for future projects?
• To what extent will lenders take on construction risk and how will this evolve?

It is widely accepted that the future of offshore wind technology will be floating. According to GWEC’s Global Offshore Wind Report 2020, floating offshore wind will reach full commercialization by 2030 with at least 6 GW installed globally. Turbine technology is also set to improve in both efficiency and resilience, resulting in LCOE reductions and increased adoption. What can be done to accelerate the pathway to commercialization?

This session will bring together the leading experts to present viable solutions to accelerate floating wind market expansion and unravel the issues surrounding technology readiness and risk mitigation, standardization, and industrialization, LCOE reduction pathways, environmental impacts, and most importantly, strategic collaboration among key stakeholders.

• Evaluate expert opinions about how to accelerate the pathway to floating wind commercialization.
• Review technology readiness and risk mitigation strategies to make the floating wind bankable for investors.
• Understand the lenders mindset and how commercial scale projects will get financed.
• Identify the next steps for standardization and industrialization of floating wind foundations to achieve economies of scale.
• Review key markets driving floating wind market growth and the policy mechanisms that have laid the groundwork for achieving market acceleration.
• Review current strategic collaboration efforts to accelerate growth of floating wind.

Coming soon.

The extension of the ITC was a welcomed certainty in the tax code that the industry needs to

Tax Equity Financing for US offshore wind projects

• What is the appetite for tax equity investments in US offshore wind projects?
• What are the financing implications of tax equity in a deal?
• How to structure tax equity deals?

East coast states have a goal to develop 29 GW of offshore wind by 2030 but big issues remain such as whether the industry should take a centralized or decentralized approach to developing offshore wind transmission and interconnection; and how should costs be shared among key stakeholders. Divergent federal and state policy adds another layer of complexity to the transmission conundrum. This session will lay bare the challenges and lessons learned by key stakeholders to date, with a focus on developing actionable solutions more efficient transmission and interconnection policy and planning processes.

Massachusetts Legislation Allowing State to Direct Utilities to Procure OS Transmission

• Understanding implications
• Transmission Developer Perspective
• Implications for other New England States

New Jersey BPU Request for PJM to Implement the State Agreement Approach

• Review of FERC 1000 Solicitations
• Fit with NJ’s OSW Procurements

New York OS Transmission Perspective

• NYS Transmission Planning for OSW
• Opportunities for Public Policy Transmission Planning Process
• OSW Developer Perspective

As the first commercial scale offshore wind project, Vineyard Wind 1, commences construction, what lessons can be learned about how was the deal structured? How might future projects be structured? This session will bring together key financing stakeholders to discuss ideas and chart the path to financing the next multi-billion-dollar projects.

• How will the next utility scale projects get funded? A look at consortia structures and the implications of market conditions on available capital.
• Who will fund them and on what terms? What is the optimum tenor?
• How will tax equity, debt and real equity play out in the capital stack?

Wind-to-hydrogen complements offshore wind perfectly. It aids the integration of more offshore wind by avoiding curtailment or constraint due to the lack of transmission capacity and decouples renewables power generation.

• Evaluate the political ambition and developer’s appetite for wind-to-hydrogen projects and discover who and where the first commercial projects will be born.
• Review the current state of electrolyser technology and current pilot projects, and the most scalable hybrid project design to date.
• Define the capital cost reduction strategies for electrolysers and the pathway to commercialization.
• Analyze the economic performance of electrolyser technologies today and the cost reduction pathway and cost-competitiveness against other hybrid solutions.

Tax equity finance will play a crucial role in helping US offshore wind projects get on their feet. In this session tax equity experts will discuss how to make these deals happen.

• What is the appetite for offshore wind in ITC versus PTC tax equity markets?
• How can tax equity deals can be structured?
• How are the managed? Such as permitting, construction, logistics, and interface risk.
• What are the perceived risks in tax equity deals and how can they be managed? What implications do they have on the deal structure?

Operations and Maintenance is expected to account for nearly one-third of offshore wind’s costs in the US, and consequently, there is a large potential for reducing these through advanced O&M strategies. This panel of experts will propose how this can be done.

• What is the availability of required vessel assets and how can O&M vessel contracts be optimized?
• How to reduce the time to access wind farms?
• How to optimize helicopter access? Advantages and disadvantages.
• How to improve crew transfer system?
• Spare part storage
• Advanced CBM

Coming soon.