EDF Renewables North America and Fishermen’s Energy have announced the submission of a joint petition for approval of the Nautilus Offshore Wind project, located in state waters off the coast of Atlantic City.
The Nautilus Offshore Wind project is expected to generate skilled offshore wind construction and operations jobs, positioning the local workforce to build gigawatts of wind projects off New Jersey’s coast and up-and-down the Atlantic coast.
The project represents a crucial opportunity for New Jersey to gain the immediate benefit of local investment, jobs, infrastructure, and offshore experience ahead of many other states looking to capitalize on this new economy. EDF Renewables and Fishermen’s Energy will contribute to the New Jersey offshore industry and deploy capital investment to bring a first project online by 2020.
The project is expected to generate skilled offshore wind construction and operations jobs, positioning the local workforce to build gigawatts of wind projects off New Jersey’s coast and up-and-down the Atlantic coast. These workers will be the first wave of the nearly 40,000 jobs that are expected to be created in the U.S., building the 8 GW of offshore wind that’s currently in the project pipeline.
EDF Renewables will leverage its global procurement capabilities, having supply agreements in place for more than 9 GW of onshore wind in North America throughout the past decade, precise skill, and long-term relationships with suppliers to source cost of energy leading technologies.
The application shows substantial net benefits to the state at a low cost for New Jersey electric consumers. Additionally, the companies anticipate the project will further serve to improve environmental management by providing a laboratory for testing of new avian monitoring and marine mammal sensing technologies.
New Jersey will realize considerable benefits by moving forward with a small-scale project first, similar to the benefits that New England reaped from moving forward with the Block Island project years ago. Most importantly, the project will bring valuable lessons learned that will bring down the cost of future projects and position New Jersey to capture more economic value as the state continues to develop its most abundant natural energy resource.
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