To assess the economic impacts of offshore wind development in the US, we used our macroeconomic model of the environment-energy-economy system, E3ME. We analyzed a scenario in which the US would develop 750 GW of US offshore wind capacity by 2050, consistent with the ‘High Ambition’ scenario in the 2035 Report 3.0. We compared this scenario to a business-as-usual baseline under two different assumptions of the domestic content share (i.e., how much of the offshore wind value chain can be captured domestically in the US): ): (1) a scenario with modest domestic content shares, with a relatively slow increase in US offshore wind supply chains over time; and (2) an ambitious scenario, where supportive economic policy allows the US to capture more of the supply chain domestically.

In designing these scenarios, we focused on key offshore wind components of the value chain: manufacturing, construction, and professional services sectors. Our macroeconomic analysis estimated impacts on the US economy as a whole, including how large-scale deployment of offshore wind affects the electricity prices for businesses and consumers, and the economic impacts that follow from these changes as well as direct investments.

We estimated subnational geographic distribution of economic impacts by allocating national-level employment results to regions of the US based on each state’s relative share of new and cumulative offshore wind capacity from 2023 to 2050, as well as other sector-specific considerations.