A STATE BOARD on Monday greenlighted a proposal by Avangrid to bring an offshore wind transmission line ashore at Craigville Beach on Cape Cod, but only after requiring the company to meet with town officials from Barnstable to try to address concerns they have about the project.
The unanimous vote by the state’s Energy Facilities Siting Board came at the end of a nearly five-and-a-half-hour hearing that focused heavily on environmental and health concerns raised by Barnstable residents who fear the impact of a high-voltage power line running from an offshore wind farm 41 miles away and coming ashore underneath one of the Cape’s most beautiful beaches.
Offshore wind farms are seen as critical to the state’s efforts to decarbonize the economy. Vineyard Wind, the nation’s first industrial-scale wind farm, is expected to start generating electricity this month and become fully operational next year. The transmission line for Vineyard Wind, a joint venture of Avangrid and Copenhagen Partners, comes ashore at Covell’s Beach in Barnstable.
The transmission line slated to come ashore at Craigsville Beach is from a wind farm called Park City Wind, which is also being developed by Avangrid. A third Avangrid wind farm called Commonwealth Wind is aiming to come ashore at Dowses Beach, also in Barnstable.
As the number of transmission lines coming ashore in Barnstable has grown, so has anxiety among residents, who are worried about popular beaches being torn apart as well as potential safety and health issues.
Members of the siting board, which is chaired by Rebecca Tepper, Gov. Maura Healey’s secretary of energy and environmental affairs, rejected Barnstable’s last-minute bid to put off a vote. Instead, the board approved the project after adopting a number of amendments to a staff-written decision and requiring Avangrid to meet with Barnstable officials in a bid to address the town’s concerns. The board required Avangrid to report back on its dealings with Barnstable by January 5.
The Energy Facilities Siting Board was created for just these situations, to prioritize the needs of the state over individual communities. Tepper and several members of the board said they didn’t want to set a precedent by allowing Barnstable to intervene in the case three years after the period for comments had closed.
Charles McLaughlin, senior counsel for Barnstable, and Mark Ells, the town manager, implored the board to put off action on the Avangrid proposal until the town’s concerns had been addressed. McLaughlin said town officials worked through the weekend to prepare a critique of the tentative decision developed by the board’s staff.
“I don’t see a meaningful opportunity for exchange and comment,” said McLaughlin.
Tepper seemed wary of putting off a vote until later and worried that doing so would set a bad precedent. “We don’t want to encourage the idea that even a town can come in at the last minute,” Tepper said.
Ken Kimmell, the chief development officer for Avangrid, acknowledged the community’s concerns. “A lot of heat has risen about this project,” he said. He suggested a way to deal with the situation was for the board to approve the project while requiring Avangrid lawyers and town officials to negotiate their differences separately.
“I have a feeling there won’t be any dispute,” he said.
One area of contention is the electric and magnetic fields created by a high-voltage power line. Town officials want more testing of the entire transmission line, not just the section running underneath the beach, to make sure any exposure is minimal. Board members also voted to require initial testing from the time the wind farm starts up and not wait until it reaches full power.
Avangrid and other wind farm developers up and down the Atlantic Coast are facing similar concerns from residents. In a commentary piece he wrote for The Virginia-Pilot on Saturday, Kimmell tried to clear up what he called “misinformation” about a potential wind farm project there.
“We’ve heard a lot of concern from residents about electric and magnetic fields (EMF) and its impacts,” he wrote. “Here are the facts. EMF is made up of a combination of electric and magnetic fields of force. Every day we use mobile phones, computers and drive and walk under overhead power lines — all of those generate some amount of both electric and magnetic fields.
“Power lines that run overhead emit extremely low frequency EMF. However, because the power lines for our project will be buried underground and encased in concrete several feet below the ground, no EMFs will be emitted; rather, only magnetic fields will be.
“Magnetic field modeling conducted by our team of experts concluded that the ‘peak’ for the magnetic field over the center of the two duct banks is less than a common hair dryer and dissipates rapidly as one moves away from the center of the duct banks. The closest residences result in a magnetic field less than that generated by a fluorescent light bulb.”
At Monday’s hearing, the Energy Facilities Siting Board also banned the use of so-called forever chemicals on the project and addressed noise concerns raised by an abutter to the electric substation being built in conjunction with the wind farm project. Avangrid is promising to install custom-designed noise-suppression equipment at the facility and build a 10-foot-high fence between the substation and the abutter’s property.
Avangrid asked for a 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. workday Monday through Saturday, but the board sided with Barnstable officials who favored a 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. workday Monday through Friday. The board also voted to require construction workers to arrive for work no earlier than 6:30 a.m. and abide by state laws limiting the idling of trucks.