Anbaric preparing bid for New Jersey’s offshore wind transmission system

The U.S. electric transmission project developer Anbaric Development Partners will participate in an upcoming competitive solicitation process for an offshore wind transmission solution in New Jersey.

The company has teamed up with DNV GL to prepare a bid for the solicitation announced in November 2020 by the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities’ (BPU) and PJM Interconnection’s (PJM), which will invite proposals from transmission system developers to address New Jersey’s goal of facilitating the infrastructure necessary to deliver the target of up to 7.5 GW of offshore wind over the next 15 years.

The competitive process is expected to kick off in the first quarter of 2021. According to Anbaric, a solicitation schedule will be released in the coming weeks.

In November, the New Jersey BPU and the regional electricity grid operator PJM signed an agreement known as a State Agreement Approach (SAA) for solicitation of offshore wind transmission solutions, which set New Jersey on a path to become the first U.S. state to fully align its offshore wind transmission goals with its regional grid operator’s planning process.

The SAA enables a state, or group of states, to propose a state-initiated project to assist in realising public policy requirements as long as it agrees to pay all costs of the state-selected buildout included in the Regional Transmission Expansion Plan (RTEP).

Transmission component options include grid-to-onshore substations, onshore substations to offshore collector farms, and an offshore transmission “backbone”.

In September 2020, the State of New Jersey opened an offshore wind solicitation for up to 2.4 GW of offshore wind capacity, as part of the Governor Phil Murphy’s plan to procure 7.5 GW of offshore wind by 2035. The application period closed in December 2020 and the winning projects and developers will be announced in June.