Don’t Worry, China Will Help Build Offshore Wind Farms In US

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Last Updated on: 16th March 2025, 10:42 am

The walking personality disorder who currently occupies the Oval Office notwithstanding, hope still springs eternal for the US offshore wind industry. After all, Election Day 2028 is just around the corner. In the meantime, China is sending a purpose-built offshore wind construction vessel to the US, and work continues apace on a major project that escaped the Trump chopping block — so far.

There Goes The US Offshore Wind Industry

For those of you new to the topic, offshore wind sites attract renewable energy planners and developers despite the relatively high cost. Wind speeds are more optimal offshore, a vast amount of space is potentially available, bigger and more efficient turbines can be deployed, and energy-thirsty coastal communities are eager to suck up the clean kilowatts.

Here in the US, as in other parts of the world, offshore wind developers can also count on the assistance of a skilled offshore workforce along with a large coterie of legacy engineering firms and other stakeholders with transferable experience in the offshore oil and gas services industry.

For the US, the 800-pound elephant in the room is the almost complete and total dependence on offshore lease areas in federal waters. Those leases are administered by the Department of the Interior, which took up the responsibility from the US Army Corps of Engineers in the early 2000’s. As a new administrative venture, the offshore lease program took a while to get organized, but it was firing on all cylinders by the time President Biden took office in 2021.

Well, that was then. Everything came to a screeching halt when Trump took office in January and suspended the lease program.

Initially, projects already in the pipeline were thought to be immune. However, earlier this week, word dropped that the Clean Air Act permit for the massive Atlantic Shores project was remanded back to the US Environmental Protection Agency for further review, even though EPA already issued a final permit for the offshore project back in October.

Atlantic Shores To White House: Nuts!

That was not the only sling or arrow to hit Atlantic Shores. In January, EDF’s 50–50 partner in the project, Shell, saw the writing on the wall and pulled out, and last month word surfaced that EDF was taking a writedown on the project. However, perhaps it is not dead yet. Atlantic Shores is still talking, at least.

On March 15, the New Jersey news organization Asbury Park Press cited an Atlantic Shores spokesperson who said, “Atlantic Shores stands ready to deliver on the promise of American energy dominance and has devoted extensive time and resources to follow a complex, multi-year permitting process, resulting in final project approvals that conform with the law.”

Make of that what you will. Perhaps Atlantic Shores will take the EPA to court, and then the Trump administration will score yet another court judgement against itself to ignore, further demonstrating its contempt for the American judicial system. In the meantime, a shipyard in China is sending a specialized offshore wind service vessel to the US, and it’s a safe bet it is not coming all this way to twiddle its thumbs.

Chinese Shipyard Builds A Service Vessel For Danish Firm, For US Wind Offshore Farm

The new vessel was commissioned by the Danish firm Cadeler, which dropped word of the US destination in a brief press release on February 28. “Today, Cadeler A/S announces that it has signed a firm contract for a significant project at an offshore wind farm located in the US,” the company stated.

“This will be the first time Cadeler’s second P-Class newbuild vessel, Wind Pace, will be deployed following its anticipated delivery. The work is scheduled to commence in Q2 2025 and the Wind Pace will be committed under this contract until Q1 2026,” they added.

“The value of the contract to Cadeler is estimated to be between EUR 67 million and EUR 75 million. This will be Cadeler’s second offshore wind project in American waters,” they concluded. And, that was that.

Offshore Wind Biz added more details last week, reporting that Cadeler held a naming ceremony for Wind Pace at the COSCO shipyard in Qidong, China on March 12.

“Like its sibling P-class vessel Wind Peak which was delivered last year, Wind Pace is specifically designed to handle the increasing size, scope, and complexity of next-generation offshore wind farm projects,” Offshore Wind Biz added, noting both ships can ferry and install complete 15-megawatt turbine sets (or five sets of 20+ MW turbines) per trip.

Virginia Holds The Fort

No word yet on how Cadeler expects to navigate the Jones Act, a part of US maritime law dealing with the eligibility of foreign-flagged ships to ferry goods and crews from one US port to another. However, US-flagged wind service vessels are in notoriously short supply, and other developers have found ways to work around the Jones Act.

At this point, Wind Pace and her crew will be awfully disappointed if they were expecting to begin installing those wind turbines for Atlantic Shores sometime later this year. Cadeler has not disclosed the wind farm in question, though, so perhaps Wind Pace will be heading over to the 2.6-gigawatt Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project.

CVOW is under the wing of the leading utility Dominion Energy. When last heard from, the project was deep into the construction phase and it took delivery of three offshore substations to the Portsmouth Marine Terminal in Virginia in January.

Regardless, recent reports indicate that the Trump chopper is coming to stop CVOW in its tracks, so stay tuned for more on that.

Why Do They Hate America So Much?

As calculated by the wind industry trade organization Oceantic Network, when Trump suspended the offshore lease program, he stranded $25 billion in supply chain investments across 40 states, putting thousands of private sector jobs at risk on top of the thousands of federal jobs already eliminated willy-nilly through his “DOGE” efficiency scam.

“While under a National Energy Emergency created by a unprecedented rise in energy demand, we should be working to quickly bring generation online instead of curtailing a power source capable of providing base load generation,” Oceantic Network pointed out on January 20.

“Driving the development of this clean energy sector is critically important to maintain global leadership against countries like China, who is outpacing American energy development on several fronts,” the organization added.

Too bad nobody at the White House is listening. Between destroying both SAID and Voice of America, tromping over European allies, cutting off aid to Ukraine, and threatening — or pledging, as the case may be — to invade and annex Canada, Greenland, and Panama, the goon in the Oval Office has already demonstrated he has a different kind of global leadership role in mind for America.

If you have any thoughts about that, drop a note in the comment thread. Better yet, find your representatives in Congress and tell them what you think!

Image (cropped): An offshore wind service vessel built in a Chinese shipyard is on its way to the US, but what will it do once it gets there (courtesy of Dominion Energy).