What 4 Years of Delay Means to an Offshore Wind Project

As soon as Donald Trump was declared the winner of November’s presidential election, climate advocates vowed to continue making progress at the state and local level. But some local projects may still depend too much on federal policy to move forward.

The president-elect’s influence has already put a highly anticipated plan to convert New York City’s biggest power plant into a renewable energy hub on shaky ground. Central to the conversion is a 1,400-megawatt offshore wind farm called Attentive Energy developed by TotalEnergies. Trump, a longtime critic of the industry, has made vague threats to “end” offshore wind “on day one.” While that overstates his capabilities, his administration will, at the very least, have the power to slow the processing of permits.

The regulatory uncertainty was enough to convince Patrick Pouyanne, the CEO of TotalEnergies, to put Attentive Energy on pause, he said at the Energy Intelligence Forum in London, according to Bloomberg — though he left open the possibility of reviving it “in four years.”

That’s bad news for the Ravenswood Generating Station in Long Island City, Queens. Ravenswood consists of three steam turbines built in the 1960s that run mostly on natural gas, though sometimes also on oil, plus a natural gas combined cycle unit built in 2004. Together, they emitted nearly 1.3 million metric tons of CO2 in 2023, or about 8% of the city’s carbon emissions from electricity production, while representing more than 20% of the city’s local generating capacity. Ravenswood is also situated across the street from the largest public housing project in the country, and has spewed pollution into the area colloquially referred to as “asthma alley” for decades.

Rise Light and Power, the company that owns the plant, has said it will redress those harms to the community by transforming the site into “Renewable Ravenswood.” The aspiration includes retiring the three 1960s-era generators and replacing them with offshore wind, battery energy storage, and additional renewable energy delivered from upstate New York via a new transmission line. Long term, the company says it will repurpose the plant’s cooling infrastructure to provide clean heating and cooling to buildings in the neighborhood.

Members of the community and local political leaders celebrated the proposal and showed up at rallies and public hearings to support it. Rise Light and Power also incorporated clean energy job training into the plan and earned the support of the union workers who operate the plant. The environmental group Earthjustice recently cited Renewable Ravenswood in a state filing as a shining example of “a more community-centered approach to energy planning.”

The website for Renewable Ravenswood declares that the plan “starts with offshore wind,” and says that “Attentive Energy One is the first step.” When Attentive Energy submitted its initial bid for a power contract with the state last year, Rise Light and Power CEO Clint Plummer told the local outlet City Limits that the wind farm “essentially unlocks ‘Renewable Ravenswood.’”

Now, it's unclear when the promised air quality benefits and jobs will materialize.

When I hopped on the phone with Plummer, the Ravenswood CEO, last week, he downplayed the implications of the pause.

“I don’t think it changes that much,” he told me, stressing that “project delays don't impact our commitment to the vision” and that “it’s simply part of the process of developing these large scale energy infrastructure projects.” Plummer said the company could continue to make progress on permitting, engineering, and other related work on the site and in the community in the meantime. Since New York state has significantly more control over onshore renewables and transmission, he said, it may be possible to move more quickly on those.

The pause on Attentive Energy may have come with or without Trump — the project, which is a joint venture between Rise Light and Power, TotalEnergies, and Corio, had already withdrawn its revised bid for a contract to sell power into New York’s energy market in October. When I asked Attentive for clarification, however, representatives didn’t respond.

The wind farm pause is the third big setback to the company’s replacement plans in as many years.

The first effort to bring clean energy to Ravenswood was a 316-megawatt battery project the New York Public Service Commission approved in 2019. It was slated to be completed by April 2021, but by January of that year, the company had not yet secured an offtake agreement with Con Edison, the local utility, and so asked for a three-year extension. The development still has not broken ground. “Our project, and most like it that have been proposed in New York City, are awaiting the State’s expected battery procurement next year,” a spokesperson told me when I asked for a status update. “We expect that projects that received State incentives through that program will likely be able to proceed to construction quickly.”

The company also submitted a bid to the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority in May of 2021 to build a transmission line called the Catskills Renewable Connector that would be capable of delivering 1,200 megawatts of renewable energy from upstate solar and wind farms to the Ravenswood site, meeting up to 15% of the city’s electricity needs. But the agency passed over the proposal in favor of two other transmission lines — Clean Path New York, which would bring renewable power to the city from Western New York, and the Champlain Hudson Power Express, which would deliver hydropower from Canada. (While construction on the latter project is well underway, Clean Path was cancelled the day before Thanksgiving.)

“We weren't selected then, but we’ve continued to mature and advance that project,” Plummer told me, regarding the Catskills line. “All these projects take a very long period of time to realize.”

The only aspect of Renewable Ravenswood that’s still alive and kicking, at least publicly, is the Queensborough Renewable Express, a set of high-voltage power lines that would connect the site to any future offshore wind farms in New York Harbor. The company is currently awaiting approval on a key permit for the line from the New York Public Service Commission. But while much of the project is located within the jurisdiction of New York, part of it will also need federal approvals.

Plummer may not be too concerned about the wind farm’s delay, but a freeze on offshore wind development for the next four years would further stretch New York’s already strained climate goals.

New York law requires the state to get 70% of its energy from renewable sources by 2030 and 100% from zero-emissions sources by 2040. The most recent progress report on those goals, compiled by the New York Power Authority, found that the state had enough renewable energy operating and contracted so far to supply about 44% of expected demand in 2030.

A separate state analysis showed that offshore wind would play a key role in reaching the target, with an expected 6 gigawatts of offshore wind generation getting New York about 15% of the way there. But so far, the state has finalized contracts for only about 1.7 gigawatts. Though New York has several additional contracts pending awards, none of those potential projects has yet submitted construction plans to the federal Bureau of Ocean Management. If that office freezes its offshore wind work for the next four years, it’s possible none of them will be able to start construction until the 2030s at the earliest.

“Four years may not be significant for project development time frames,” Daniel Zarrilli, the former chief climate policy advisor for the city of New York, told me. “But the state has these 2030 and 2040 goals, and so many pieces of what makes up the ability to hit those goals are under stress. So it’s certainly not good news.”

New Yorkers aren’t the only ones who will be affected by the pause. Attentive Energy was also working on two additional offshore wind projects that would send power to New Jersey. The developer had already secured a contract to sell power into that state from a 1.3-gigawatt project called Attentive Energy Two. In July, it submitted a bid to New Jersey’s fourth offshore wind solicitation for an additional, unnamed 1.3-gigawatt project. The New Jersey Board of Public Utilities is expected to reach a decision on that solicitation this month.

I reached out to TotalEnergies to ask whether all three projects were paused or just the New York one, but the company said it would not comment on Pouyanne’s speech. The New Jersey Board of Public Utilities also did not respond as to whether Attentive had pulled either its awarded contract or bid.

It’s true that developing these projects takes a long time, and that anyone excited about Renewable Ravenswood should not have expected any new clean power to come into the site until the end of this decade, anyway. But further delays could have real consequences. “Any of these projects faltering is just going to keep New York City reliant on an aging and dirty fossil fleet,” said Zarrilli. The city is in a hole, he said, after the Indian Point nuclear plant closed and made it even more reliant on natural gas for electricity.

On my call with Plummer, he emphasized several times that the city has “the thinnest reserve margins we’ve had in decades” — in other words, it doesn’t have much wiggle room to meet increases in electricity demand. Rise Light and Power has already shut down 17 small gas “peaker” plants that were previously part of Ravenswood to make room for new renewable energy infrastructure. The city will be in better shape in 2026, assuming the Champlain Hudson Power Express finishes on time, according to the New York grid operator NYISO. But by the early 2030s, when additional peaker plants are expected to be shut down due to pollution regulations, New York could be back on thin ice.

By then, the steam turbines at Ravenswood will be nearly 70 years old. Unless significant additional generation comes online by then, Rise Light and Power could be forced to re-invest in those gas generators rather than retire them. “It’d be terrible if they were forced to make that choice in the future,” said Zarrilli.