Massachusetts is switching on its first major offshore wind farm
The first major offshore wind farm in New England is here started producing electricitya milestone for a sector that has struggled to get off the ground over the past year.
The stream started flowing late Tuesday. For now, the Vineyard Wind project, located off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, can send just five megawatts of power to the grid from a single towering wind turbine. But the companies behind the project, Avangrid and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, plan to install a total of 62 turbines with a capacity of 800 megawatts, or about enough electricity to power 400,000 homes, by the end of this year.
“We have arrived at a turning point for climate action in the US, and a dawn for the US offshore wind industry,” said Pedro Azagra Blázquez, CEO of Avangrid, a US subsidiary of Iberdrola, the Spanish utility.
Vineyard Wind is the second offshore wind farm in the country that will generate electricity. Another major project off the coast of New York, South Fork Wind, began producing power in December. Once completed, South Fork will be able to produce 132 megawatts of electricity.
The two projects come online at a turbulent time for the emerging offshore wind industry. To combat climate change, many eastern states hope to install dozens of large wind farms in the Atlantic Ocean that could generate electricity without emitting any planet-warming greenhouse gases. But lately, developers of these projects have faced rising costs, high interest rates, supply chain delays and outbursts of local opposition.
Developers have already canceled contracts for several large, planned wind farms in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York, saying the deals were signed before rising inflation and interest rates hit the profitability of those projects. As a result, analysts at BloombergNEF say they expect only 15,000 megawatts of offshore wind power to be installed in the United States by 2030, about a third less than they expected as recently as June.
The latest cancellation came Wednesday, when Equinor and BP announced that they were terminating a contract with New York to sell the state’s electricity from Empire Wind 2, a proposed 1,260-megawatt offshore wind farm that would be located southeast of Long Island.
The Empire Wind project isn’t necessarily dead, analysts said. The companies could still re-tender this year for a new contract to sell power to New York state at even higher prices. Many eastern states are now faced with the reality that offshore wind energy will likely prove more expensive than initially planned.
The Biden administration has made offshore wind energy a priority, aiming to essentially create an industry from the ground up. But the United States remains far behind Europe, which has already installed more than 32,000 megawatts of capacity in its waters.
Developers have been trying to build offshore wind turbines near Cape Cod, Massachusetts, since the early 2000s. An initially proposed project near Nantucket known as Cape Wind was ultimately canceled after a backlash from residents who said the turbines would spoil ocean views. Its successor, Vineyard Wind, was proposed further offshore in 2018, but took years to obtain federal permits after the Trump administration press pause on the project. But in 2021, under the Biden administration, Vineyard Wind became the first large-scale wind farm to receive federal approval. Construction started in June.