At a Glance:

Southern New England and its relatively small states are highly important for a global solution to climate change for three reasons. 

First, New England has some of the strongest offshore winds on the East Coast. Onshore wind is strongest in the midwest, solar most abundant in the southwest. Only by leveraging these collective assets can we build a renewably powered nation that steps up to the emissions challenge.  Second, leadership in offshore wind in the western hemisphere will help build momentum that is already well underway on other continents. It will demonstrate the job and economic development benefits of rapid adoption of renewable near-zero carbon energy.  Finally, climate change is a global problem, which means the transition to clean energy has to happen everywhere - including New England.  Emissions must reach zero, New England must play its part, and the most abundant resource we have to achieve this goal is offshore wind.  

A Deeper Dive:

Electricity production is the single biggest source of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, roughly ⅓ of all emissions.  However the next two biggest sources are transportation and building heating, both of which are in the process of being electrified (through EVs and heat pumps).  As a result, even assuming no growth, US electricity production will need to roughly double in order to eliminate fossil fuel combustion in cars, trucks, and furnaces.  

Where will this electricity come from, and how can we get it without generating greenhouse gas emissions?  The Southwest has abundant solar, and the midwest has abundant onshore wind. Unfortunately, both are quasi-disconnected from the electricity grid in the Northeast (Figure 3). Similarly Texas, which has abundant solar and wind, is isolated from the rest of the U.S. grid. While long distance transmission lines can, and should be built, strong advantages to regional energy production will remain into the foreseeable future.

Right now New England gets electricity mostly from fossil gas (methane) and nuclear power. While the latter does not emit CO2, the siting of new nuclear facilities is both slow and politically contentious (even more contentious than offshore wind!).  In fact, there are only three nuclear power plants remaining in New England, the most recent built in the 1990s.  So, given a rough doubling of electricity demand with the electrification of transport and building heating, what are the options?

Solar resources in New England are limited by the low angle of the sun for most of the year at our latitude, although parking lots, rooftops and even some open spaces can be used for this purpose. As an example, the New England States consumed 120,000 GWh of electricity in 2022.  This amount could be produced (annually) by about 300,000 acres of solar panels - roughly ⅓ the size of the state of Rhode Island. This same amount of energy could be provided by about 3,000 turbines offshore (which would cover a bit less than 270,000 acres of ocean when spread out for efficiency). That’s a lot of space, either way. But that would displace all of the electricity generation by fossil fuels in all of New England (in terms of annual amount - wind and solar will need to be coupled with storage to be fossil fuel free 24/7/365).  

We do not drill for oil or gas, or mine coal, in New England. In order to transition off of imported fossil fuels, New Englanders need to do their part and have some hard choices to make. RI and MA rank 44th and 35th in energy used per person when compared to other states (https://www.eia.gov), but when compared to energy used per person worldwide each US resident emits about 4 times as much as a typical person (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use?tab=chart). There is no free lunch - fossil fuels cause enormous local environmental harm where they are produced, in how they are transported, and locally when they spill (or gas mains explode). Their combustion drives climate change, which impacts New England and the rest of the world. Those impacts will amplify until the day we all stop burning fossil fuels. So - we will need to use land for solar, and ocean space for wind turbines. These are the resources we have. They will have impacts, but fortunately, their impacts will be tiny compared to the fossil-powered alternative.