VINEYARD WIND may have missed its self-imposed 2023 deadline for generating electricity, but that shouldn’t overshadow what is starting to happen off the coast of Massachusetts.
On Tuesday night at 11:54 p.m., the wind farm team of Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners and Avangrid passed a major test – generating 5 megawatts of electricity from one turbine and successfully transmitting the electrons via a transmission line into the regional power grid on Cape Cod.
In the grand scheme of things, it was a baby step. But “first power” finally signals – albeit belatedly — that the wind farm industry is starting to move from the development into the operational phase.
“I think it’s a huge milestone,” said Ken Kimmell, vice president of offshore wind development for Avangrid. “Think about it, 15 years of policy, a false start with Cape Wind, all of the challenges the industry has faced with the economy and the Trump administration.”
Despite all the setbacks and delays, the nation is starting to generate offshore wind power. South Fork Wind, a joint venture of Orsted and Eversource, announced the delivery of first power from its 12-turbine project off the coast of Long Island on December 6, 2023. Now Vineyard Wind, a massive 62-turbine project, is generating power.
Kimmell said no one 10 years from now will fret about when first power occurred. What’s important is that it happened, he said.
“It’s a little like the first time someone walked on the moon,” Kimmell added.
In a press release issued on Wednesday by Avangrid and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, 12 politicians were quoted. They included the governor, the mayor of New Bedford, the House speaker, the Senate president, and eight reps and senators. They hailed the first power announcement as a historic milestone.
Delays have become standard procedure in the wind farm business. Cape Wind in late 2017 was derailed by a billionaire landowner on Cape Cod who felt the wind farm would spoil his view.
Vineyard Wind secured its lease 15 miles off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard in 2015 and won a power contract from Massachusetts utilities in 2017. Just as its federal environmental review was nearing completion in 2018, the Trump administration put the project and the emerging offshore wind industry on hold while it studied the potential impact of locating wind farms up and down the East Coast.
Once the Biden administration greenlighted Vineyard Wind in 2021, the development team managed to secure most of the contracts for project components before the economy reversed course last year. Interest rates and inflation soared and the war in Ukraine wreaked havoc with the wind farm supply chain. Vineyard Wind and South Fork moved forward, but nearly every other wind farm up and down the coast had to cancel and start over.
Avangrid and South Coast Wind, a joint venture of Shell New Energies and Ocean Winds North America, both terminated projects with Massachusetts, losing security deposits of tens of millions of dollars.
Vineyard Wind has also faced challenges during construction, but the development team has been tight-lipped about them. Company officials predicted first power would happen in October and, when that didn’t happen, by the end of the year. There was talk on a boat tour to the wind farm this summer that turbines could be installed at a rate of one a day. None of those predictions proved to be accurate.
Officials now say it will take some additional time for the first turbine to become fully operational and it will be “early in 2024” before another four are spinning, generating 65 megawatts of power at maximum output. All 62 turbines are expected to be up and running by the end of 2024, generating a maximum of 806 megawatts, enough to power 400,000 homes.
While Vineyard Wind is moving toward completion, Massachusetts finds itself starting over with offshore wind. The state has procurements for offshore wind but only one wind farm is actually under construction. The others were terminated.
Massachusetts is launching another procurement at the end of this month in partnership with Connecticut and Rhode Island. It’s possible that all five wind farm developers with leases off the coast of Massachusetts will submit bids, which is something that has never happened before.
Avangrid and SouthCoast are expected to submit bids, as is Vineyard Offshore, an affiliate of Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners. The big question marks are Orsted and Equinor, both of which have seen their financial statements battered by recent wind farm contract terminations. Both developers, however, are currently running promotional ads with CommonWealth Beacon and other publications. Would they be doing that if they weren’t planning to bid?
