The Business Network for Offshore Wind, a leading national organization working to accelerate offshore wind energy deployment and build a robust domestic supply chain, supports Thursday’s announcement of a new Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between nine Northeast states and the Departments of Energy, Interior, Commerce, and Transportation.
This new agreement creates a framework for new regional partnerships focused on offshore wind supply chain development and calls on all signatories to collaborate in addressing national high priority gaps like port development, shipbuilding, and domestic steel production. If fully embraced by the states, this new collaborative effort could help foster greater investments in the US supply chain by moving closer to a more robust and stable domestic market in need of goods and services.
To date, supply chain development has often been the result of individual state procurement processes, leaving uncertainty with investors whether investment in one state would be recognized equally elsewhere. Today’s MOU builds on the Federal-state Offshore Wind Implementation Partnership launched in 2022, which listed supply chain development as a future focus area. The Network has long advocated for greater cross-border collaboration between states and featured the recommendations in two recent publications – A Supply Chain Roadmap for Offshore Wind Energy in the United States and Advancing Policy Measures to Drive Development of the Domestic Offshore Supply Chain.
“State collaboration is the key to unleashing the full potential of a domestic supply chain; the Network congratulates the Biden-Harris Administration and all of the East Coast states in coming together on this shared goal. We've spent a decade working to facilitate these partnerships, and this action marks a significant milestone in fostering this collaboration.
Up to now, states have done the heavy lifting to seed our emerging supply chain and the time is right to maximize the US market’s attractiveness by driving regional collaboration. Building partnerships between states will foster more investments in new manufacturing facilities and strengthen existing projects, leading to more job growth and a more robust domestic supply chain needed to build the offshore wind industry and hit the nation’s clean energy goals, “ said Liz Burdock, Founder and CEO of the Business Network for Offshore Wind.
