On a chilly June day, with the Massachusetts island of Martha’s Vineyard just over the far horizon, a low-sailing green-hulled ship ended up hammering a steel column 100 feet into the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
This marked the beginning of construction of the first giant offshore wind farm in the United States, a project of the scale to make a major contribution to the Northeast’s power grid.
For some watching from a nearby boat, the driving in of the first pile marked a milestone they had been striving for for 20 years. The $4 billion project, known as Vineyard Wind, is expected to start generating electricity by the end of the year.
“This was really hard,” said Rachel Pachter, the chief development officer of Vineyard Offshore, the US arm of Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, a Danish renewable energy developer that co-owns the wind farm. Bringing a major energy project near population centers to this point would require clearing numerous regulatory hurdles and avoiding potential opposition and lawsuits.
“You don’t see big infrastructure projects built in New England anymore,” she said, “especially in places where they’re highly visible.”
Mrs. Pachter has seen the difficulties first hand. She started as an intern fresh out of college in 2002 and spent more than a decade working on a project outside of Massachusetts called Cape Wind; it ultimately failed, in part because of fierce opposition over the years from the likes of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, who died in 2009, and the billionaire William Koch. Vineyard Wind also has noisy opponents. Some people in the fishing industry say turbines will make their job almost impossible.
However, Ms. Pachter helped orchestrate a campaign of community outreach, job creation and funding that eventually led to a point where, in industry parlance, steel goes into the water.
In the coming months, 62 turbines, each up to 800 feet high (taller than any building in Boston) with blades about 350 feet long, will be planted on a stretch of seabed 15 miles from Martha’s Vineyard, the island where former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton are on vacation.
Cables carrying electricity generated by spinning rotors will land on a beach in Barnstable on Cape Cod and then travel to consumers across the state. Vineyard Wind says its machines will provide enough power to light 400,000 homes.
Wind farms are usually built surprisingly quickly once construction starts. Klaus Moeller, the chief executive of Vineyard Wind, who is Dane, said he expected Vineyard Wind – “touch wood” – to be completed next summer.
The situation looked very different in 2019 when the Trump administration scrambled Vineyard Wind’s plans and halted a further two-year study, jeopardizing the proposal. But the Biden administration wants to make offshore wind a big part of the effort to quickly build renewable energy and related jobs, and it gave Vineyard Wind the go-ahead in 2021.
Building and installing the giant machines at sea is a fairly new proposition in the United States. There are only a few other smaller offshore wind farms in the country. Another, about a fifth the size of Vineyard Wind, is expected to come online at Long Island this year.
Europe has thousands of offshore turbines, and much of the expertise and equipment used in Vineyard Wind’s construction, including the specialized vessels used to drive the turbine towers into the seabed, comes from across the Atlantic.
Wind developers also say they are hampered by a centuries-old law, the Jones Act, which prohibits the use of US ports to launch foreign construction vessels. To comply, Vineyard Wind plans to land turbine components at a port in New Bedford, Mass., and then ship assembled machines to the site on U.S.-flagged vessels — a process that incurs additional costs.
Industry executives and analysts say construction of this first massive U.S. wind farm should pave the way for similar plans.
“If they can pull this off, it will open doors,” said Dan Reicher, an assistant secretary of energy in the Clinton administration and an advisor on a California proposal.
In fact, according to Wood Mackenzie, a consulting firm, a series of wind farms are planned that could run up to about 75 times the capacity of Vineyard Wind. About 80 percent of this area is off the east coast.
According to Christian Skakkebaek, founder of Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, the east coast “in many ways resembles the North Sea, with a shallow seabed, sandy bottom and high winds.”
Vineyard Wind executives like Ms. Pachter are turning their attention to other wind projects, including another tract near Vineyard Wind, a second off the coast of New York and a third on the west coast, near Humboldt County in Northern California.
The company acquired the acreage for Vineyard Wind in 2016 from asset management giant Blackstone. Mr Skakkebaek said his company had decided to bring in a partner from the United States and turned to Avangrid, a US subsidiary of Iberdrola, a major Spanish utility company.
While Vineyard Wind has critics, the opposition has been less intense than Cape Wind’s. One reason is visibility. The project is further from land, in the Atlantic Ocean, while Cape Wind was nestled between Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and another island, Nantucket. When built, the tops of the turbines will be barely visible from the islands, the company says.
People in Massachusetts also say that from an early stage, the developers took their concerns seriously, such as protecting endangered whales. “They took those things to heart, and they mitigated what they could mitigate and came up with a pretty responsible project,” said Andrew Gottlieb, the executive director of the Association to Preserve Cape Cod, an environmental advocacy group.
Some islands and towns along the Massachusetts coast are seeing economic benefits from Vineyard Wind. The town of Barnstable, which opposed Cape Wind, attempted to be the landing site for Vineyard Wind’s cables. The benefits: $16 million in payments and collaboration on the construction of a new sewer system, saving taxpayers millions, said Mark Ells, the city manager.
The company also says a turbine maintenance center, built on Martha’s Vineyard, will create 90 full-time jobs — a significant number for a vacation destination that primarily provides residents with summer jobs.
“It’s a really big deal for the island to get 90 full-time jobs year-round,” said Dylan Fernandes, who represents the island in the Massachusetts legislature.
On the other hand, many of the manufacturing jobs offshore wind could provide in the United States have yet to materialize. While the turbines will be supplied by General Electric, the cabin-like structures called nacelles that house the gearing and electronics will be made in France. The first knives come from a factory in Canada. GE has said it will build two plants in New York if it gets enough orders.
Fishing groups stand out among the opponents of offshore wind. People in the industry say turbines are hindering their fishing and that Washington has not consulted them enough when awarding leases. They fear a coastline dotted with wind farms.
“Vineyard Wind is the first of many projects that threaten to wipe out commercial fishing on the East Coast of the United States,” said Meghan Lapp, the fisheries liaison for Seafreeze Shoreside, a fishing company based in Point Judith, RI.
Ms Lapp said the wind farm site was a prime summer location for the squid that make up a large part of her company’s business. She said boats hauling in the squid wouldn’t be able to fish safely between the turbines and the massive structures would interfere with their radar, jeopardizing safety.
Vineyard Wind has attempted to placate the fishing industry by chartering boats to patrol the construction zone and providing approximately $40 million for potentially lost catches. But Seafreeze and others have filed a lawsuit to suspend Vineyard Wind’s lease, arguing that in the race to secure renewable energy, the federal government ignored its own environmental regulations.
At the moment, however, offshore wind and the huge amounts of clean energy it promises seem to have a chance.
“Just building a project will change so much,” said Ms. Pachter.
