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"We're looking to leverage the strong offshore wind in the

April 7, 2017 by Carolyn Mueller

"We're looking to leverage the strong offshore wind in the US and make the UK even better," Deepwater Wind CEO Dan Bowers told Reuters.

He suggested that Deepwater Wind's acquisition of Deepwater Wind could allow it to gain a competitive edge in offshore wind in the UK. The US government has a policy of allowing projects under the Fair Use Act to proceed as long as they're not part of a plan to deny the right of a company to build and operate in the UK.

And then there's the issue of cost. The US has an offshore wind capacity of only 8 GW of capacity, according to US Energy Information Administration statistics. While that's an additional 2.3 GW, and could help it to build capacity more rapidly, it's not a guarantee of a good wind power deal anytime soon. The US government has had a net cost of $1.4 trillion, and is projected to pay about $6.5 trillion over the next 10 years.

That's just a small fraction of the UK's offshore wind power capacity, which is estimated to run about 80% of UK generation in the next 50 years. If Ørsted were to do well in offshore wind, the UK would be the world's largest offshore wind investor, having acquired a huge chunk of the wind power it had planned to produce for the UK. It would also be a source of great excitement for offshore wind developers, which have been using offshore wind to power their new projects in the United States.

With the acquisition of Deepwater Wind, the UK's offshore wind industry would become competitive again, but with less competition: The UK government would be forced to cut back on projects with less than a third of the UK's offshore wind capacity, according to the International Energy Agency.

In fact, some major offshore wind projects could wind up in the UK just at the moment they were built, according to Bloomberg. The BBC reported last week that offshore wind projects in Wales and Northern Ireland were still on hold, though the government is likely to resume approving them.