ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. — The U.S. Department of Defense and Bureau of Ocean Energy Management have reached a memorandum of understanding intended to improve the collaboration of offshore wind power development proposals. 

The move is intended to address one of the frustrations common to offshore wind development and countless other endeavors: the need to work across multiple government agencies that operate independently of one another, or sometimes even at cross purposes. 

While DOD is just one of many governmental entities, it exerts a particularly strong influence on decision-making. Offshore wind development has been paused indefinitely off parts of the Maryland and Virginia coastlines because of potential conflict with the heavy military activity there. 

BOEM Director Elizabeth Klein and Brendan Owens — assistant secretary of defense for energy, installations and environment — formalized the agreement between their two agencies at the close of the first day of American Clean Power’s Offshore Windpower conference Oct. 29. 

Owens emphasized the commonality between the two agencies. 

“The other hat that I get to wear in the job that I have at DOD right now is chief sustainability officer,” he said. “So there’s a tremendous convergence of what the Biden administration is asking all of its federal agencies to do, and the work that you all are doing and the work that DOD is doing.” 

ACP CEO Jason Grumet spoke of the imperative of collaboration as developers try to unite disparate groups of stakeholders and the challenges that presents. 

“Anyone who has actually spent time in federal service knows that one of the most challenging collaborations is among federal agencies,” Grumet said. “One of the things that I think really has marked this administration has been a remarkable amount of coordination and collaboration in a whole-of-government understanding of what it’s going to take to manage and balance our energy and environmental needs.” 

Almost all power for DOD facilities comes from outside those facilities, Owens said, so the military has a direct interest in the grid from a mission capability standpoint. “If we can flex from one source to another, that gives us resilience for our mission, and that’s the reason that we view the deployment of offshore wind critically as something that needs to be accelerated.” 

But not, he said, at the expense of training and readiness. “So DOD and BOEM have worked together to identify … and avoid impacts to national security for offshore energy planning,” Owens said, “and this MOU codifies the way that we will do that going forward.” 

“The MOU helps to define and clarify roles and duties of both of our organizations in leasing and project planning processes,” Klein said. 

In a news release, BOEM said the MOU expands on a 1983 memorandum of agreement on their activities in the Outer Continental Shelf. 

The announcement flagged four key goals: 

• • find mutual solutions that support renewable energy in a manner compatible with essential military operations; 
  • collaborate as early as possible in the offshore wind leasing process; 
  • regularly communicate and exchange information at the staff and leadership levels; and 
  • determine what areas should be deferred from leasing to enable the performance of DOD activities on the OCS.