Impact of potential non-deployment of offshore wind capacity

Determine how the modeled emissions, generation, and clean electricity procurement results would change if the 13 GW of offshore wind capacity assumed for New England were not deployed because state and regional policies supporting it were not retained.

Background

The regional analysis incorporates state and regional policies that drive clean-energy deployment, including an assumed 13 GW of offshore wind capacity in New England. This capacity contributes to the modeled supply of carbon-free electricity in the Eastern Interconnection and therefore affects the attribution of generation, emissions outcomes, and procurement patterns.

The authors explicitly note uncertainty about whether the policies supporting this offshore wind deployment will remain in force. They leave unresolved how removing the assumed capacity would affect the reported results, identifying this as a topic for future work.

References

Although currently included in the model, it is unclear whether the state and regional policies driving offshore wind deployment will be retained. Future work could explore the impact to these results should this offshore wind capacity not be deployed.

— Evaluating Proposed Spatiotemporal Matching for Scope 2 Market-based Accounting: emissions, cost, and policy tradeoffs for hourly matching and tighter geographic constraints  (2610.22022 - Livengood et al., 15 Oct 2026) in Section 3.2, Figure 4 discussion, footnote 4