On a breezy
Thursday morning beside Johnnie Mercer’s Pier, spokesmen from Environment North
Carolina, the North Carolina chapter of the Sierra Club and Wrightsville Beach
Mayor David Cignotti gathered to release the latest offshore wind energy report
completed by the National Wildlife Federation.
“Our message
today is clear,” said Environment North Carolina field director David Rogers. “In
the race up and down the Atlantic to have the first offshore wind project, we
can’t let North Carolina fall behind. Our state leaders need to act now, first
by demanding that Congress extend the offshore wind tax credit before it
expires at the end of the year and by setting a bold goal for offshore wind
development in North Carolina.”
After reviewing
the national report, Zak Keith of the North Carolina chapter of the Sierra
Club, said five areas along North Carolina’s coast have been identified as
areas of high interest for wind power development, which include the waters off
the coasts of Sunset Beach, Southport, Cape Lookout, Cape Hatteras and the
northern Outer Banks. Zac Singleton, another member of the North Carolina
chapter of the Sierra Club, said the new report only reaffirmed what
organizations like his had know for a long time: that North Carolina has the
highest potential to harness offshore wind energy among all other states along
the Atlantic Ocean. Singleton said the Sierra Club’s role in developing this
industry would be to educate the public.
“Educating the
public is going to be important and letting them know that it has a potential
to create a lot of jobs in the local economy; North Carolina currently buys
most of its energy from out of state,” Singleton said. “Also I think we should
educate people that these wind farms would be so far off the coast that they
would be out of sight.”
Some of the statistics
Rogers shared from the report included that, “Meeting the Department of
Energy’s goal of 54 gigawatts of offshore wind power — just a fraction of the total
potential in the Atlantic — would avoid as much carbon pollution as taking
nearly 18 million cars off the road.”
An advocate for
developing clean energy and moving away from oil dependence, Wrightsville Beach
Mayor David Cignotti said it would only make sense for the state to invest in
offshore wind energy.
“What I would
stress is, I understand that it is urgent for our nation to have a national
energy policy and I understand that fossil fuels are part of that policy, but
it is time that we get moving on renewable energies like wind energy,” Cignotti
said. “Different parts of the country have different energy sources that work
best for them and in this region … we know that wind energy has huge potential
so let’s be a leader instead of a follower.”
