On the morning after the General Assembly adjourned, Governor Martin O’Malley signed scores of bills into law, grouping them in a category of creating jobs. The highlight of the bill crop was O’Malley’s proposal to encourage development of wind turbines off the coast of Ocean City.
“The heart of all new job creation really is innovation, innovation in terms of the things we make and how we make them. In this case, renewable energy.”
The governor finally won approval of the legislation on his third try, but there is no guarantee that investors will come forward. Mike Tidwell, executive director of the Chesapeake Climate Change Action Network, called measure a “first step.”
“The governor has said for the last couple years, ‘Look, we need to place a buoy out there in the Atlantic and then we need to swim toward it. And I think that what you’re going to see with this bill is an initial wind farm of a modest size, it might be twenty or thirty wind turbines, but that’s going to be our buoy. And we’re going to build around it.”