NEW YORK: After hitting its lowest point in almost a decade last year, the US onshore-wind sector is slowly spinning back to life.

       Prospects are improving thanks to new tax credits and stronger demand – and as developers work to overcome a cloud of challenges including inflation, higher borrowing costs and supply-chain kinks.

       In 2023, those obstacles limited US onshore installations to just seven gigawatts, according to BloombergNEF, down from a peak of 17 gigawatts in 2020 and the smallest amount of new wind energy built on US soil since 2014.

       The same issues continue to thwart the fledgling, though higher profile, offshore wind industry.

       Last year was also marked by the US onshore sector’s struggle to make sense of the landmark Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which was intended to quickly accelerate new wind and solar development.

       “We’re hitting the bottom,” said Aaron Barr, global head of onshore wind at consultancy Wood Mackenzie. “2023 was a bit of a reload and reset year but the promise for onshore wind is very high.”

       Wind farms are a crucial part of the effort to purge planet-warming carbon emissions from the US electric grid.

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       President Joe Biden has set a target of delivering 100% clean electricity by 2035, but any slowdown in the construction of new wind farms will make reaching that ambitious goal much harder.

       The 2022 passage of the IRA, which includes generous tax credits for wind developers, followed a gradual phase-out of other federal tax credits for wind power that had contributed to a decline in new projects. — Bloomberg