President Joe Biden's administration approved the nation's first major offshore wind project, ushering in a new industry that will help coastal states across the U.S. decarbonize power grids.

The Biden administration, which set an ambitious offshore wind target of 30 GW by 2030, announced at a May 11 press conference with Cabinet officials its approval of Vineyard Wind LLC's 800-MW Vineyard Offshore Wind Project, located 15 miles off the shores of Martha's Vineyard, Mass. The project is a partnership between Denmark-headquartered infrastructure investor Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners K/S and Avangrid Inc. subsidiary Avangrid Renewables LLC. Iberdrola SA of Spain is Avangrid's parent company, a reflection of the dominance of experienced European developers in the blossoming U.S. industry.

The approval is a long-awaited kick-start to an industry that has the technical potential to produce almost twice the amount of electricity annually than the U.S. consumed in 2019. Developers are actively eyeing 30 offshore wind projects in Atlantic, Pacific and Gulf Coast waters. But the industry will likely first boom on the East Coast, where states are already targeting more than 33 GW of offshore wind power by 2035.

The Biden administration has centered its renewable energy agenda around the issue of job creation. Officials said building 30 GW of offshore wind by 2030 would create up to 80,000 jobs in construction, engineering maritime and other industries. Pressed about whether the U.S. supply chain can handle the offshore wind boom, Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo said American companies are already creating steel and building vessels in places such as Alabama, Texas and Louisiana.

"This project has been a long time coming," Raimondo said during the press conference.

But many workers have been skeptical that the country can transition from a fossil fuel to renewable energy economy in a way that does not leave them behind, according to Sean Garvey, president of the North American Building Trades Unions.

"There's [been] a lot of trepidation as well as consternation as we've dealt with so-called just transition, and what does a just transition look like as we move to combat climate change and move to renewables?" Garvey said during the press call. "Our experience onshore has not been great."

But, he said, "The building trades [have] a project-labor agreement signed with a developer, which will enable them to not only transition their members but also transition folks who haven't had a lot of opportunity — from at-risk communities, women, people of color, veterans — to get in on the training that we provide through our training centers and participate in building this new offshore wind — not only in Massachusetts, but up and down the East Coast and then to the West Coast."

Avangrid executives said earlier in May that they expect Vineyard Wind to begin producing electricity in 2023. It will generate enough energy to power 400,000 homes. Massachusetts, along with electric distribution subsidiaries of National Grid USA, Unitil Corp. and Eversource Energy, in 2018 selected the project to provide power for their customers in the state's first solicitation for offshore wind.

The project has been over a decade in the making. The U.S. Interior Department's Bureau of Ocean Energy Management began scoping the Atlantic coast for suitable lease areas for offshore wind early during the Obama administration, and Vineyard Wind began expressing interest in the site in 2011.

Vineyard Wind snapped up the 160,000-acre lease area in 2015, but for years the project experienced regulatory setbacks while federal agencies figured out how to manage the presence of turbines as tall as the Statue of Liberty in heavily trafficked U.S. waters. The commercial fishing industry has been especially vocal in its objections to offshore wind.

The bureau in August 2019 put the brakes on its environmental review of the project to consider the impact of building at least 22 GW of offshore wind along the Eastern Seaboard, as states began setting more ambitious offshore wind targets. And in the last days of the Trump administration, Vineyard Wind — saying it needed to account for its decision to use General Electric Co.'s 13-MW Haliade-X turbines — withdrew its construction and operations plan just as the Interior Department issued a legal opinion that severely limited the government's ability to approve offshore wind projects.

But the Biden administration brought renewed confidence that the industry would finally take off. It reversed the Trump-era legal opinion April 9, clearing the way for Vineyard Wind's regulatory approval. The administration completed the review of Vineyard Wind's environmental impact statement in early March.