U.S. President Joe Biden’s plan to deploy 30,000 megawatts (MW) of offshore wind by 2030 is still possible, although not easy, the CEO of Ørsted, the world’s largest offshore wind farm developer, said on Sept. 18 at the Climate Week NYC event in New York.

The Biden administration has passed lucrative subsidies aimed at helping companies build new offshore wind power capacity to help decarbonize the power sector and revitalize domestic manufacturing.

However, even with state and federal regulatory rules and subsidies in place, developers are facing a whole new set of obstacles, including inflation and higher interest rates.

The Danish energy company said at the end of August that it may see U.S. impairments of 16 billion Danish crowns (US$2.3 billion) due to supply chain problems, soaring interest rates and a lack of new tax credits.

“We’ve seen dark clouds gather,” CEO Mads Nipper said, noting that interest rates going from largely 0% to 4%, which is having a “very dramatic impact on renewables because the fuel of the renewable industry is capital.

“We don’t need gas or oil or coal. It’s capital and that overnight has become significantly more expensive,” Nipper said.

Other dark clouds include “financially fragile” supply chains, “relatively uncertain policy frameworks,” and rising costs for “everything we need” from turbines to foundations and substations with inflation that has gone up over the last 12 months, Nipper said.

Policy makers and the industry need to accept that “for a little while the price of renewable power will have to go up, but we will bring it down again,” Nipper said.

Offshore