Gov. Phil Murphy bet a lot on offshore wind projects that never materialized. His critics say he had no "plan B." (Dana DiFilippo | New Jersey Monitor)
By Nikita Biryukov
Reprinted with permission
of New Jersey Monitor
As Gov. Phil Murphy’s time in office nears its end, his renewables-heavy energy goals are receiving mixed reviews.
Though Murphy presided over a broad expansion of solar power in New Jersey, his greater plans to produce thousands of megawatts in offshore wind generation ultimately failed to create any new power, even as some existing power plants were shuttered, reducing the electricity New Jersey sends to its multi-state grid despite increasing generation within state borders.
Murphy’s energy goals were always ambitious. In successive pronouncements, the governor called for New Jersey to draw 100% of its energy from clean sources, first by 2050 and then by 2035. But most of those goals were never memorialized in law. Murphy, a Democrat, is leaving office in January after two terms while the two front-runners to replace him, Republican Jack Ciattarelli and Democrat Mikie Sherrill, pan his energy policies on the campaign trail.
Jeff Tittel is a former longtime director of the New Jersey Sierra Club who has both allied with and criticized the governor.
“He really never did the follow-through. He did the splash, everybody applauded him, and then there was very little follow-through,” Tittel said.
The state first solicited bids for offshore wind farms in September 2018, just months into Murphy’s first term. The problems began nearly two years later with the pandemic, when a series of supply chain disruptions spurred by COVID-19 restrictions ballooned project costs.
Ørsted, the Danish wind giant tapped to build more than 3,300 megawatts of offshore generation, pulled back from the projects in 2023, saying supply chain constraints, inflation, and growing borrowing costs made them unfeasible.
“He bet heavily on wind — and I’ll get some environmentalists mad at me — but the wind program got too big, too expensive, and they got too greedy, the wind companies, and it collapsed,” said Tittel. “He bet everything on wind, and he lost.”
Shell New Energies, a 50-50 partner in Atlantic Shores projects that would add 4,310 megawatts in offshore wind capacity, in January made a similar withdrawal only days after President Donald Trump retook the White House and issued an executive order pausing leasing and permitting for offshore wind projects.
The state Board of Public Utilities in August rescinded its contract with Atlantic Shores, the lone project with leases and permits in hand, at the developer’s request. The developer sought to rebid in the state’s latest round of wind solicitations to secure better financial terms, but regulators canceled the call for proposals, citing in part federal uncertainty.
The Murphy administration dismisses the idea that it focused too much on wind energy. Eric Miller, executive director of its climate action and green economy office, noted other states on and off of PJM’s grid faced similar rate increases, regardless of their energy mix. PJM Interconnection is a regional transmission organization that provides power to New Jersey and 12 other states.
“Certainly, we leaned in on offshore wind as a new industry, but I wouldn’t say all the eggs were in that basket by any means, and I don’t think there’s data that supports the position that New Jersey leaning in on offshore wind somehow led to any problems that we’re having at the moment,” Miller said.
Mammoth energy demands from AI data centers proposed along the grid have pushed electricity capacity prices to new highs, spurring large increases to ratepayer bills after years of largely static electricity demand.
Those increases have become a focal point for Murphy’s would-be successors, who have made energy policy a cornerstone of their campaign platforms. Sherrill has pledged to freeze electricity rates for a year if elected, while Ciattarelli has said he would ban offshore wind farms and pursue a more diverse energy mix.
The amount of power New Jersey supplies to the grid run by PJM fell over Murphy’s tenure despite increases to the state’s overall generation, according to a New Jersey Monitor review of state and federal energy data.
Roughly 2,914 megawatts in grid generation were retired under Murphy through the end of August. Since the start of Murphy’s first term in 2018, New Jersey has added 1,417 megawatts in grid generation, meaning the grid saw a net loss of about 1,500 megawatts from New Jersey over the governor’s time in office.
About 80% of the retired generation came from fossil plants. The shuttering of the Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station and termination of a handful of low-generation solar projects accounted for the rest of the losses.
Republicans have pointed to the closures in their bids to lay blame for rising electricity prices at Murphy’s feet, though his predecessor, Chris Christie, was responsible for some of them.
Oyster Creek closed 10 years early in 2018 under a deal reached by Christie’s administration that allowed Exelon Generation, its then-owner, to avoid building new cooling towers to meet state environmental standards.
BL England, a coal and petroleum plant that shuttered in April 2019, did so under an agreement reached under Christie. Doomed efforts to repower the plant using natural gas continued through the first 14 months of Murphy’s time in office.
Shuttering plants without replacement generation in hand would put upward pressure on prices, according to Matt Hale, an associate professor of political science at Seton Hall University, who said New Jersey may have been better served by pursuing natural gas conversions like those seen in Pennsylvania and, to a lesser degree, New York.
Hale last month released a study examining a decade of energy policy in New Jersey and neighboring states, one that concludes New Jersey did not create a “plan B” that would have mitigated any failures to increase its renewable and clean energy capacity.
“Instead of looking at renewables or not renewables, the better policy would’ve been ‘let’s get rid of the worst.’ Let’s get rid of coal, but in a transition period, let’s turn those coal plants into natural gas so we have that power,” Hale told the New Jersey Monitor.
Hale’s research was funded by the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 825, a supporter of natural gas projects.
A little under half of New Jersey’s grid generation retired under Murphy came from natural gas plants, though in some cases those plants were decades or even half a century old. In some cases, plants closed because their power was too costly to bid into the capacity market before the recent spate of increases.
“What happened in New Jersey with resources retiring due to economics was common in the entire PJM region, where we saw old economic resources go offline, largely due to record low capacity pricing,” Miller said.
Of the new power generation seen under Murphy, 760 megawatts came from natural gas plants that went into operation early in his tenure, while the remainder came from solar and battery storage projects. The state also has two gas plants in Bayonne and Linden whose 1622 megawatts are sent to New York’s single-state grid.
It’s not clear whether New Jersey could compel those producers to keep their power on PJM’s grid under the deregulated generation market the state created in 1999. Some legislators have raised re-regulation as an option to control rising prices.
Murphy did attempt to maintain the rest of the state’s nuclear power supply. In 2018, he signed legislation that extended roughly $300 million in subsidies, called Zero Emission Credits, to the state’s remaining nuclear plants.
New Jersey ratepayers paid for those subsidies at the cost of about $70 each year, and they were approved over objections from environmentalists — a key Murphy constituency — who said the plants did not need the money to stay operational, as their owners claimed.
State regulators sunset Zero Emission Credits in June. By that time, they had been supplanted by federal production credits approved under President Joe Biden.
Miller said it is impossible to know whether Zero Emission Credits could have sunset sooner, though he defended the administration’s support, pointing to discussions to restart generation at Three Mile Island and Oyster Creek to meet data centers’ energy demands.
“I think the important part is our subsidies led us to a point where the fleet in Salem never went down, which is very valuable, and while on the margins maybe they could have come off a year earlier or so, we’re pretty confident the right decision was made,” he said.
Nuclear plants in South Jersey still account for roughly 40% of the state’s energy generation.
In a lot of ways, the reason New Jersey is a net importer is because it is often — not always — cheaper to make electricity outside of New Jersey.
– Abe Silverman, a research scholar at Johns Hopkins University
Overall generation in New Jersey increased under Murphy, despite declines in the energy that the state sends to the grid, chiefly because of rapid growth in the solar power delivered through behind-the-meter projects that do not plug into the grid, first through rooftop solar and later through community solar projects.
The state added 3,159 megawatts in solar generation through state incentive programs under Murphy, though that electricity overwhelmingly stayed off the grid. Just 16% of New Jersey’s 5,221 megawatts of generation goes to the grid, including 531 megawatts that went in under Murphy, according to federal data.
That distribution means the economic benefits of solar have spread unevenly: Those able to install them on their roofs or to participate in a community solar program saw lower rates, but the lack of new grid generation did little to constrain growing capacity prices.
The community solar program includes a requirement that half of its members be low- or moderate-income residents.
Murphy this summer signed bills that directed regulators to secure an additional 5,000 megawatts in community solar and battery storage generation.
“Our policies have made it significantly easier to access clean energy — helping bring solar energy and electric vehicles to more families and businesses than ever before, in addition to bringing online new sources of electricity following the market-led loss of capacity in states across the region,” said Murphy spokeswoman Stella Porter.
Some critics have pointed to New Jersey’s increasing energy imports as a source of price increases. But while importing electricity from out of state may lead to marginally higher transmission costs, capacity prices that are responsible for recent increases are set along the entirety of PJM’s 13-state market.
The state’s density, combined with a comparative dearth of open space and higher labor costs, mean standing up generation in New Jersey is more expensive than in other states on the grid, and requiring New Jersey to obtain all of its energy in-state rather than opportunistically buying wherever prices are low would increase costs, said Abe Silverman, a research scholar at Johns Hopkins University who studies energy regulation.
“The beauty of electrons is they don’t care about political party, and they don’t particularly care about state borders,” Silverman said. “In a lot of ways, the reason New Jersey is a net importer is because it is often — not always — cheaper to make electricity outside of New Jersey.”
