After a judge ruled White House “stop-work order” sabotage attempts illegal (twice), the 700 MW Revolution Wind project has come online in the waters off Rhode Island, and the 800 MW Vineyard Wind 1 off Massachusetts has completed construction! Both are already sending power to the New England grid. Revolution Wind will provide clean electricity for over 350,000 homes and businesses when it reaches full capacity later this year. Vineyard Wind will save consumers at least $1.4 billion on electricity bills in its first 20 years by avoiding expensive fossil gas imports.

These are the largest-yet and second- and third-ever commercial offshore wind farms in America, after the 130-MW South Fork Wind project off Long Island. Several more are on the way in waters from Virginia to Massachusetts, begun under Biden and surviving insane political attacks, and should come online soon. Around the world, studies keep finding that wildlife actively benefit from wind farms, with fish and marine mammals congregating around the new shellfish growing on the turbines and foundations. America is at last getting clean power-generating artificial reefs!

Offshore wind farms are a model of energy/environment coexistence as well as an economic boost helping fight cost-of-living inflation as fossil fuel prices skyrocket. It’s also been at the center of negotiations around a new desperately-needed bipartisan permitting reform bill recently introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives. Named the FREEDOM Act, it includes key provisions from the recent SPEED Act and GEO Act bills (neither of which passed) that would make it much easier to build energy projects in America without years of red tape.

As of 2023, the U.S. had far more already-proposed market-desired solar and battery capacity waiting to be built than there was electricity-generating capacity from all sources already built! Permitting delays are a major bottleneck slowing and eventually killing clean energy projects in the “interconnection queue.”

Critically, the FREEDOM Act also includes extremely badly needed new legal protections to prevent the President abusing executive powers to cancel or pause energy projects, included expressly to prevent the exact kind of insane ideological attacks that have tried to strangle the newborn American offshore wind industry.

Now that the economics are on the side of renewable energy, the final remaining barriers to effectively unlimited clean electricity are political and procedural. Permitting reform overwhelmingly benefits clean energy abundance and is quite simply the top priority for affordability, climate action, and national development.

Tell Congress to pass the FREEDOM Act and unleash clean energy abundance!