This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. America’s first large-scale offshore wind farms began sending power to the Northeast in early 2024, but a wave of wind farm project cancellations and rising costs have left many people with doubts about the industry’s future in the US. Several big hitters, including Ørsted, Equinor, BP, and Avangrid, have canceled contracts or sought to renegotiate them in recent months.
From the time today’s projects were bid to the time they were approved for construction, the world dealt with the Covid-19 pandemic, inflation, global supply chain problems, increased financing costs, and the war in Ukraine. Steep increases in commodity prices, including for steel and copper as well as in construction and operating costs, made many contracts signed years earlier no longer financially viable.