JON MITCHELL, the mayor of New Bedford, sees a lot to like and some things to be concerned about with the state’s latest offshore wind procurement.
The bids that came in last week were heavily redacted and the most important variable – the price of the power – wasn’t revealed. But Mitchell has always been less concerned about price and more focused on what offshore wind can do for his city, the center of the state’s offshore wind industry.
Mitchell likes the fact that the three offshore wind developers vying for business in Massachusetts have either stated publicly or told him privately that they want to use the port of New Bedford as an operations and maintenance base. The mayor says operations and maintenance work is attractive because it involves a good number of jobs for the entire life of the project, typically 20 to 25 years.
He also likes the fact that Avangrid wants to provide seed funding and an initial contract for a New Bedford-based manufacturing facility making cranes used for loading and offloading equipment on wind turbines. Mitchell, in a letter to the Healey administration, called it a “15-employee, Tier 2 manufacturing facility.”
A concern is that Salem is likely to grab a good chunk of the offshore wind farm staging work and the New Bedford Marine Commerce Terminal could sit idle for two to three years after Vineyard Wind 1 is completed next year.
Wind farms need a staging area (some call it a marshaling area) where they can bring in the giant components and assemble them before they are delivered to offshore wind farm construction sites. Both Avangrid and Vineyard Offshore say they intend to use Salem as the staging site for their proposed wind farms, while Mitchell says the companies behind SouthCoast Wind have told him they will use the New Bedford Marine Commerce Terminal starting most likely in 2028.
Mitchell said the New Bedford terminal could shift over to other cargo work during the down time, or possibly land business with offshore wind projects based in other states. He raised the possibility of splitting staging work between Salem and New Bedford to keep them both busy.
“The state has invested a ton in both places,” he said of New Bedford and the soon-to-be-built Salem staging port.
Another concern is SouthCoast Wind. Unlike the other wind farm developers, who laid out their onshore development plans last week in lengthy and detailed press releases, SouthCoast said little other than that it plans to submit a bid for a 1,200-megawatt wind farm that would come online by 2030.
Mitchell says SouthCoast has promised him it will concentrate staging as well as operations and maintenance in New Bedford as long as Massachusetts purchases half of the wind farm’s power output. But SouthCoast said nothing about those plans last week and wouldn’t confirm anything when asked by the New Bedford Light.
On Tuesday morning, however, Rebecca Ullman, director of external affairs for SouthCoast Wind, issued a statement to CommonWealth Beacon saying the offshore wind developer will let the three states involved in the procurement – Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island – dictate what gets done where.
“Our bid to the multi-state solicitation proposes to marshal and pre-assemble our turbines out of the New Bedford Marine Commerce Terminal in New Bedford,” Ullman said in her statement. “We also provide the states with the option to marshal components out of Salem, MA or New London, CT. The project will have one operations and maintenance port and for that we have offered locations in each state. By providing the states with options, we have put them in the driver’s seat to decide what makes the most sense for their communities and ratepayers.””
Then there is Donald Trump. The possibility of a Trump victory in November creates tremendous uncertainty for the offshore wind industry. When Trump was president, his administration hemmed and hawed over offshore wind development and essentially put the industry on hold for the two years before Joe Biden was elected president and began fast-tracking offshore wind projects.
“The possibility of his reelection is in the back of everyone’s mind,” Mitchell said, acknowledging the uncertainty may be affecting the financing of some projects.
Avangrid announced Tuesday morning that it had obtained a record of decision for its New England 1 and 2 wind farms, the major federal approval needed to move forward. Mitchell said Avangrid’s permit status gives it a leg up on other proposed wind farms that are unlikely to have their federal permits in hand by the time the next president takes office.
In his letter to the Healey administration, Mitchell urged state officials to remember that a key goal of the offshore wind procurement is “to build a lasting offshore wind cluster based in historically ‘economically distressed areas.’”
To that end, the mayor urged the Healey administration to award the three wind farm developers contracts that would allow them to deliver on their investment promises to New Bedford and keep the city’s offshore wind business growing.
“As much as I’d like to get everything, the objective here is to build a nautical cluster,” he said.
