COVID-19 pandemic posing risk to 25 GW of US wind projects

The outbreak of the COVID-19 infectious disease could pose a hazard on the construction of 25 GW of US wind projects representing an investment of USD 35 billion (EUR 32.4bn), the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) warns.

The US wind sector could lose a total of USD 43 billion in investments and state and local tax payments to rural communities and land-lease payments, the sector organisation said on Thursday, citing initial estimates. Urging Congress to make changes to the schedule of wind deployments and related regulations, it went on to say that the global spread of the novel virus could put over 35,000 jobs at risk, or almost a third of the 114,000 job positions that the industry creates.

"To best protect these jobs and the health of our existing workforce, we are asking Congress to immediately extend the schedule and improve the liquidity of our existing tax credits,” said AWEA's CEO Tom Kiernan.

AWEA’s proposal in order to cope with the created uncertainty in the market is for the government to extend the provision of tax incentives by an additional two years to safe harbour projects that have entered construction after December 31, 2015. This will allow the delayed projects to receive the tax credits as originally envisioned, with developers getting direct pay equal to the value of the credits, which in turn will help offset the economic hurdles created by the pandemic.

Last year, the US commissioned 9,143 MW of new wind power generation capacity and had an additional 44,000 MW of projects under construction or in advanced development at end-December.

(USD 1.0 = EUR 0.927)

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