In another major win to the growing U.S. offshore wind industry, New Jersey selected Denmark’s Ørsted to become the site of the first major offshore wind manufacturing facility in the country, with plans of the company locating its construction logistics base, foundation and transition-piece staging port, and its operations and maintenance port in Paulsboro, according to a report.

This follows another success in Massachusetts, where MHI Vestas won bid for Vineyard Wind’s 800-megawatt project; in Maine, where a bipartisan bill just passed requiring the state’s Public Utilities Commission to approve a power-purchase agreement for the 12-megawatt Aqua Ventus floating offshore wind project, which will be built using two turbines off the coast of Maine and will bring clean energy technology to full scale; in Virginia, Dominion Energy began construction of an offshore wind farm, a two-turbine demonstration project off the coast of Virginia; and in Maryland, US Wind and EPIC Applied Technologies are set to install a meteorological tower off the coast of Ocean City, and will be used to collect wind resource data. At present, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) has 15 active commercial leases for offshore wind development that could support more than 21 gigawatts of generating capacity.

New Jersey’s Ocean Wind project marks the state’s commitment to produce 3.5 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030—a part of its pledge to eliminate carbon sources by 2050. According to Reuters, the project is expected to “generate enough electricity to power 500,000 New Jersey homes. It will also generate $1.17 billion in economic benefits and create 15,000 jobs.”

This promising turn bodes well for the nascent of the offshore wind industry, with BOEM employing a regional approach in its planning and leasing process. In the Mid-Atlantic seaboard, Delaware and Maryland have expressed interest in identifying additional Wind Energy Areas (WEAs). These continued efforts have helped in further developments of renewable energy programs.