PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Dozens of hard hats and yellow safety vests were neatly placed on folding chairs. A giant American flag hung from the rafters of a hangar-sized fabrication building. And cellophane-wrapped cookies with blue icing spelling out “Revolution Wind, powered by Ørsted and Eversource,” added the final celebratory touch.
After a rough year for the fledgling U.S. offshore wind industry, the crowd of union leaders, energy company representatives, state and federal officials, media, and other guests at the Port of Providence on June 13 were marking the final assembly of the advanced foundation components for the Revolution Wind project, a 700-megawatt offshore wind farm currently under construction 12 miles southwest of Martha’s Vineyard that will deliver energy to Rhode Island and Connecticut.
Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee called the now-bustling port – packed with offshore wind turbine components and hosting a gleaming new crew service vessel built for Ørsted, the Danish offshore wind giant, docked nearby – “an example of what can happen all around the country.” The construction progress “marks a pivotal moment, not just for Rhode Island but our country’s offshore wind industry,” McKee added.
Other governors across New England are banking big on the mammoth turbines being installed off the coast to not only keep the lights on as the region moves toward cleaner electricity, but also to meet a surge in power demand from electric vehicles and a shift to electrified home heating.
The region’s push into offshore wind comes amid longstanding apprehension by federal regulators and the nation’s electric reliability watchdog over New England’s dependence on natural gas power generation, worrisome when paired with its constrained pipeline capacity during extreme cold.
Whether the hundreds of turbines planned to spring up off the coast – and the major grid upgrades needed to get that power to where it’s needed – can reliably meet those expectations will come down in large part to timing, experts say.
That includes not just how fast developers, who are facing supply chain problems and sometimes stiff local resistance and have complained about permitting delays, can get turbines built, but also when the expected demand increase from an electrified future materializes.
Also in the mix: how quickly the system is able to inject the power produced offshore and whether it can handle the dips in output that can come with variable generation, said John Moura, director of reliability assessment at the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, which sets and enforces standards for the American power system.
“They can build and design this, it’s really about time, money, and the will to do that,” Moura said. “The timing piece is the part we’re most concerned with.”
‘Moving in the same direction’
The New England Independent System Operator runs the electric grid for Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, ensuring that there’s enough electric supply to match demand in real time. What helps make that somewhat easier than in regions overseen by other multi-state regional transmission organizations is broad alignment among its member states on energy policy.
All six have clean power goals. Rhode Island is pushing for 100 percent renewable power by 2030. Connecticut is requiring 100 percent zero carbon power by 2040.
Massachusetts wants to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. In June, Vermont’s legislature overrode a gubernatorial veto to enact a 100 percent renewable energy by 2035 standard.
Maine is aiming to get to 80 percent percent renewable power by 2030 and 100 percent by 2050.
New Hampshire is something of an outlier, but even it has a renewable energy portfolio standard that requires utilities to purchase increasing amounts of renewable energy certificates.
“They’re all more or less moving in the same direction,” said Matt Kakley, a spokesman for ISO New England. That can make debates over longer term transmission planning and improving processes to determine who pays for what less fraught than elsewhere.
Even before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s landmark order on transmission planning and cost allocation earlier this year, there was broad agreement among New England states on a new framework that was approved by FERC in July to plan for state renewable goals and how to allocate costs of associated network upgrades.
“Our hope is that this kind of allows us to get to work on as a region, on some of the stuff that we know is coming,” Kakley said. If the states’ decarbonization goals are to be met, Kakley said, that means an estimated doubling of electricity use in New England over the next 30 years and a tripling of the winter energy peak.
“On the transmission side, we’re in good shape right now,” Kakley said. “However, we know, if we’re going to move to a system that’s largely powered by offshore wind, that’s going to trigger the need for upgrades, not in the initial wave but when you start looking at the bigger quantities.”
‘It just defies logic’
Despite those trends, there’s been reason to worry that offshore wind development might lag. For the past year, developers have struggled with supply chain problems and spiking costs driven by inflation, forcing some East Coast projects to be canceled or renegotiated.
The projects have also been in some cases vehemently opposed by coastal communities and dogged by (spurious, according to marine mammal experts and federal agencies) accusations that they’re harming whales, along with lawsuits from fishermen and, in at least one case, preservationists worried about losing ocean views.
This month, part of a blade broke off of a turbine that was part of Vineyard Wind 1, the nation’s first commercial scale offshore wind project, leaving fiberglass and foam debris to wash up on Nantucket beaches.
The Maine Lobstermen’s Association, which represents hundreds of people who make a living hauling the famous crustacean out of the water for diners around the world, has been a major opponent of offshore wind potentially encroaching on fishing areas.
The federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which oversees offshore wind leases areas, is moving forward with a lease sale in the Gulf of Maine that largely excludes the areas used by the state’s lobster boats.
But Patrice McCarron, the group’s policy director, isn’t backing off of criticizing the proposal.
“Nobody in the fishing industry thinks the Gulf of Maine is a good place to develop offshore wind,” she said in an interview in June at the organization’s cramped offices in Kennebunk. “It’s one of the most productive ecosystems in the world. It supports one of the most valuable fisheries, if not the most valuable fishery in the nation, which is lobster.”
A distorted view
People who might not have seen offshore wind development up close can have a distorted sense of what it is in practice, she added.
“If you don’t fish, you think of offshore wind as being something very green, something that’s going to solve climate change, something that’s good for the environment. If you’re a fisherman, you think about what it actually is, you know, 800-plus foot turbines floating on concrete blocks that are 300 feet by 300 feet with turbine blades that are at the length of a football field.”
McCarron said the fishing industry also worries about loss of habitat, impacts on marine species, potential vibrations and other effects and, the uncertainty of floating offshore wind technology, which is what would be developed in the deep waters of the Gulf of Maine but is relatively rare still. (One offshore wind executive told States Newsroom that Gulf of Maine turbines aren’t expected to happen for about a decade.)
“I don’t like the term ‘coexist,’” she said. “It just defies logic that you would industrialize a place that is so special and that fishermen have done such a great job of taking care of and stewarding. Nobody wants to see this built.”
Solid fundamentals
Less than 100 miles south of McCarron’s office, wind developers, state and federal officials, and others with ties to the industry were still optimistic on the prospects for offshore wind at a conference in Boston organized by Reuters.
However, panels with names like “How to navigate growing pains,” “Risk mitigation,” “How to overcome critical supply chain bottlenecks,” “Confronting transmission complexities,” and “How to deal with misinformation” spoke to the rough seas companies pushing offshore wind projects have had to sail over the past year.
There were also official as well as side-channel conversations about the election and what kind of blow a second Trump administration might deal to offshore wind.
But the through line of the conference was that the fundamentals underlying offshore wind – a large untapped source of relatively steady clean energy close to the coastal cities that are big drivers of electric demand – remain strong. And state and local officials are still keen on the jobs and economic impact that can come from standing up a new American industry.
“I would look to Virginia, as for me, giving me some optimism for the industry, for the future,” said Diane Leopold, chief operating officer of Virginia-based utility giant Dominion Energy, which is building the 2,600-megawatt Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project off the coast of Virginia Beach, the largest offshore wind farm under construction in the U.S.
Bipartisan support
Leopold touted the project’s strong bipartisan support. “It supports climate change. Large businesses in the state want renewable energy. We have a fast-growing load in the state, and offshore wind produces a lot of megawatt hours and it creates a diversity of supply that really helps grid reliability. And then, of course, offshore wind creates an enormous number of jobs and a lot of local economic activity.”
Chris Wissemann, CEO of Diamond Offshore Wind, a developer, said the industry is on the path to recovery, with states and developers now negotiating agreements that include mechanisms to adjust prices to respond to inflation and other problems.
“This has been a sobering event that is maybe once in a generation,” he said. “To a great extent what we’re doing in offshore wind as a country we haven’t done since nuclear power in the 60s and 70s and all of those projects were essentially ratepayers paid whatever they cost to build because you were doing them for the public benefit. I think a little of that needs to come into this market.”
European companies, he added, sold regulators on the promise that they could build as easily as in Europe. “This has been sobering to a lot of the Europeans catching on that the U.S. is a bit different: building the supply chain here and getting things permitted, dealing, honestly, with our political dysfunction. It’s a real issue, right?”