The Inflation Reduction Act is being lauded for its sweeping health and environmental impact, including on Guam and the CNMI. President Joe Biden is expected to sign it into law in the next week, which would open up offshore wind development to the region for the very first time. 

Del. Gregorio Sablan for the CNMI said, "It was Puerto Rico who took the lead on this, and have been pushing for this. I think they are in a more mature position than us here in the Northern Marianas on how to transition from fossil to clean energy and they needed to get that ruling out of there."

The Inflation Reduction Act is expected to pass the House this weekend and make it to President Biden's desk for signing. Sablan says its a paired down version of the Build Back Better Act. A key difference? The act removes a rule that banned the renewable developers from wind energy leases in the territories. 

Erik Milito, is the president of the National Ocean Industries Association, representing offshore energy in wind, oil, gas, and carbon sequestration, for the past 50 years. "It is actually more of a historical remnant of the way the statute was originally set up. This goes back to the 50s when they first defined what a submerged land is. It was defined it back that time to be waters off of U.S. coastal states and that did not include territories and it just was never changed," he said.

Now that it's changed, the Interior Department will conduct a feasibility study for the territories before any projects break ground. 

"That is a process that might take five years before we get there but with this language in the bill it is a start from the transition from oil and diesel to clean windmill energy," he said. "Saipan has 45,000 people if not less. I do not know if there is a market ready enough to take on this endeavor but if it is, and if the federal government can help -- this is where it starts."

Milito says that start requires aggressive government action.

"In order to make this happen it takes a lot of work on behalf of your government to attract it and to make it part of your power generation network. So what we've seen in the Atlantic Coast is those states have taken independent action to require off shore wind within a certain amount of time to be put into their power grid," he said.

The legislative change allowing that happen, he says, is long overdue. 

"The legislative authority is critical for the industry to being looking at areas in places like Guam and other territories to potentially make the investments but also for the territorial governments to begin taking seriously this as an opportunity for diversifying the energy in your backyard," he said. 

And what could our backyard look like? Milito said, "When you look at an island like Guam, it could be a relatively simple and straightforward project where you could have floating wind turbines. It is a new technology but it is coming along rather quickly. There are projects in Europe that are taking off when it comes to floating wind."

That would require drawing investors and for utility companies to find ways to build infrastructure to tap the wind farms offshore.