Project cancellations, rising costs, and federal headwinds have given opponents of offshore wind plenty of ammunition to declare the industry’s American chapter closed before it ever truly began.

But in the Mid-Atlantic, our geography of comparatively shallow waters — even 10 miles offshore — favors the development of offshore wind. As electricity demand keeps climbing, along with consumers’ bills, investments in the necessary ports and electrical infrastructure already dot our coastline.

Walking away from offshore wind now would rank among the costliest mistakes the region could make, for electric ratepayers and the broader economy alike. Recent victories in the courts offer us another chance to make good on its promise.

Policymakers in PJM states have a choice to make. The evidence says offshore wind is worth it. Do our governors, public utility commissioners, and state legislators have the political will and regional coordination it’s going to take to get offshore wind online?

The demand is real, and keeps growing

The Mid-Atlantic region and the PJM grid face an electricity load surge not seen in generations. Data centers have spread across Northern Virginia and suburban Maryland at a pace and a hunger for electricity that seems impossible to sustain. Transportation and households continue to electrify. Weather patterns are increasingly volatile, making summers hotter and winter storms more extreme.

Fossil fuel plants keep retiring. New dispatchable generation takes years to permit and faces cost challenges. PJM’s own capacity reports have sounded the alarm: The region faces a growing gap between reliable generation and what customers will need.

Offshore wind — abundant, domestic, and scalable — stands among the few resources capable of closing that gap at the speed and volume the grid requires.

The case for a Mid-Atlantic offshore wind hub

The Mid-Atlantic doesn’t just qualify as a good place to build offshore wind; it may rank as the best place in the world to build its next generation.

Winds off the coasts of Maryland, New Jersey, Delaware, and Virginia are among the strongest and most consistent on the Eastern Seaboard. Federal lease areas sit in relatively shallow water, within an economically viable distance of shore. And critically, the load centers — the cities, suburbs, and data center corridors hungry for power — cluster close enough to the coast to keep transmission distances manageable.

The economic case reinforces the energy one. The American Clean Power Association’s 2024 Offshore Wind Market Report projected 56,000 jobs and $65 billion in investment nationally by 2030.

However, federal actions, including a permitting freeze and a construction suspension across all five projects then under active development, put an estimated 17,000 offshore wind jobs at risk, according to the Center for American Progress. Additional losses rippled through ports, manufacturing, and supply chains. Seventeen states have filed suit to reverse the freeze, and courts have now blocked several moves by the administration as arbitrary. However, the Mid-Atlantic’s offshore wind future can no longer depend on the federal consistency it once enjoyed.

A committed bloc of Mid-Atlantic states, coordinating procurements and sending long-term demand signals to the market, can attract the investment needed to build a genuine American offshore wind supply chain centered on this region. This will not only boost economic activity but stabilize costs for ratepayers, a winning political issue right now.

Transmission: the long pole in the tent

What separates states that will succeed in offshore wind from those that won’t? It all comes down to transmission. Constructing turbines offshore is, relatively speaking, the easier challenge. Getting that power reliably and affordably onto the grid will make or break projects.

For years, Mid-Atlantic states pursued offshore wind in isolation — each running its own solicitations, negotiating interconnection agreements, planning independent cable routes to shore. That approach proved expensive and inefficient, and contributed directly to the cost overruns that have plagued the industry. The only path to a different outcome runs through multi-state transmission coordination.

A shared offshore transmission backbone — connecting multiple wind zones to multiple load centers across state lines — would cut the per-megawatt cost of delivering offshore power to consumers by unlocking economies of scale in the supply chain. It would also strengthen system resilience.

PJM has the structure to facilitate exactly this kind of regional planning. States that invest in that coordination now will pay less for cleaner, more reliable power for decades. Opting out will cost more later.

The path forward

Legislators and governors ought to keep in mind these three goals to maximize the benefits of offshore wind in the Mid-Atlantic:

1. Create an efficient channel for transmission planning, giving state governments (and voters) an active role in facilitating the necessary power lines rather than leaving it entirely up to regulators and utilities.
2. Maintain predictable purchasing as much as possible, despite changes in the political environment, so that developers and suppliers have the confidence to invest over the long term. If federal legislation upends state plans, find legal ways to challenge it.
3. Invest in communications that make the affirmative case to the public: Offshore wind isn’t about ideology. It’s a practical solution for a grid that needs more power.

Other states will be paying close attention. The Mid-Atlantic’s success or failure in building a coordinated offshore wind hub could shape the national industry’s overall trajectory. Get it right here, and we’ll demonstrate that large-scale offshore development works in America, helping lower the cost and complexity for every state that follows in our wake.

Paulina O’Connor is New Jersey State Director with MAREC Action (informally known as “Mid-Atlantic Renewable Energy Coalition”), a 501 c(4) non-profit group of utility-scale solar, wind, and battery storage developers andmanufacturers dedicated to promoting the growth and development of renewable energy in the Mid-Atlantic region; and on the PJM grid. 

MAREC Action | marec.us

Author: Paulina O\’Conner
Volume: 2026 September/October