The shifting winds of Jeff Van Drew

As anti-wind activists and politicians along the Jersey Shore have ramped up their attacks on wind development this year, they’ve found a powerful ally in Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-Dennis). From his perch in Congress, Van Drew has become one of the movement’s top attack dogs, charging that the new wind turbines currently under development are wasteful, destructive, and unwise.

“It is environmentally, economically, and in every way we can possibly imagine a disaster,” the congressman said on Fox Business earlier this year. “There is nothing good in this.”

But that wasn’t always Van Drew’s tune on offshore wind. During his 17 years in the New Jersey Legislature – and before his famous defection to the Republican Party in 2019 – Van Drew was generally a supporter of wind energy, voting for a number of tax incentive bills for wind development and even authoring a few of his own.

According to Van Drew himself, his position hasn’t changed as much as some might think. While he acknowledged that he has “evolved a lot” on the issue, Van Drew told the New Jersey Globe that the main thing that has shifted since he was in the state legislature is the scale of the wind farms themselves, which he said are far larger and more disruptive than he had foreseen.

“[My party switch] has nothing to do with it,” Van Drew said. “I was never, ever for something like this… There are ways of going about this. This is not the way.”

Van Drew specifically pointed to Fishermen’s Energy, a proposed pilot program that was vetoed by Gov. Chris Christie in 2016, as the type of wind development he did support. The project, which would have created smaller-scale wind farms off the coast of Atlantic City, had Van Drew’s strong backing throughout his time in the state legislature.

“Quite frankly, we have lacked a real energy policy in this country for decades and that has to come to an end,” Van Drew told the Cape May County Herald in 2008 during a press conference on Fishermen’s Energy.

The congressman drew a clear distinction between that type of project and those currently under development, like Ørsted’s Ocean Wind One. Ørsted’s large-scale wind development, Van Drew said, is deadly to marine life – an unusual number of whales died along the Jersey Shore earlier this year, though their deaths have not been empirically connected to offshore wind development – harmful to the tourism and fishing industries, expensive for ratepayers, and damaging to America’s energy independence (Ørsted is a Danish company).

“Everyone in the fishing industry is really concerned and thinks it’s going to be a problem, everyone in the tourism industry thinks it’s going to be a problem, our national security folks have expressed that it’s a serious issue, our utility bills are going to go up – who could be for a project like that?” Van Drew said.

But Van Drew’s voting record in the legislature went significantly beyond just supporting Fishermen’s Energy.

During his early days in the State Senate, Van Drew sponsored multiple bills enabling wind development, including one that would have required the state Board of Public Utilities (BPU) to offer the same financial incentives for wind energy as it did for solar energy. In 2010, he voted in support of the landmark Offshore Wind Development Act, a tax incentive bill that marked the true beginning of offshore wind in New Jersey.

And in 2018, Van Drew was a sponsor of a sprawling clean energy bill that, among other things, provided additional tax credits for offshore wind development. Those tax credits are what allowed project’s like Ørsted’s to get underway; a year later, the BPU approved Ørsted’s Ocean Wind One.

Van Drew maintains that the huge turbine farms currently under development go far beyond the scope of what he envisioned, but it wasn’t exactly a mystery in 2018 what the projects might eventually look like.

“Certainly, you had to know that in order to derive any appreciable amount of energy, it was going to require large-scale wind farms,” said Micah Rasmussen, the director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University. “That’s been known for a long time.”

Rasmussen added that while Van Drew was not the legislature’s leading wind energy proponent – that distinction likely belonged to former Senate President Steve Sweeney (D-West Deptford) – he also did not voice any particular concerns, unlike some of his Republican colleagues.

“To my recollection, you never had him saying, ‘Wait a minute, let’s slow down here, what’s going to happen here with our Shore?’” Rasmussen said. “I don’t remember that ever being an issue, until it became a political culture clash.”

There’s also a family twist to the story: Van Drew’s daughter, Danni, is a Delaware-based public relations consultant who counts Ørsted among her clients. Van Drew said that Danni has nothing to do with Ørsted’s New Jersey division, and also wryly noted that if his daughter’s job was a factor in his political decision-making, then he’d be supporting wind development, not opposing it.

“If I was a ‘typical politician,’ I’d be doing everything I can to help her,” he said.

Ultimately, whatever Van Drew’s previous views on wind energy, his current stance is quite clear: offshore wind development is bad for a bevy of reasons, and should be halted immediately. He indicated few concrete regrets about his past positions, but said that he’s learned quite a bit since then.

“The more we learn about this technology, the more we learn that it is not a good technology, and that it’s not going to work well,” Van Drew said. “I think we’ve learned a lot. I’ve evolved even more – I don’t even want to do pilot projects anymore. But it was a worthy endeavor.”

This story was updated at 3:46 p.m. with a correction: Danni Van Drew is a public relations consultant, not a lobbyist.