USA TODAY International Edition
OFFSHORE WIND FARM A GREEN- ENERGY MILESTONE
R. I. project ready to rotate into the history books
The first offshore wind energy farm in the USA is up and nearly ready to go, marking a new chapter in the nation’s changing electricity grid.
Thursday, workers finished installing the last of five turbines off Rhode Island’s coast, a little more than a year after the Providencebased developer Deepwater Wind first put steel in the water.
“A lot’s happened over the last year,” said Jeff Grybowski, CEO of Deepwater Wind. “I feel like the industry has really turned the corner.”
As Grybowski spoke, a Norwegian ship called the Brave Tern and two other vessels mounted General Electric turbine nacelles — the housing for the generating equipment — on 270- foot towers in state waters 3 miles southeast of Block Island.
Now that all the turbines are installed, the next step is commissioning and testing the equipment, which will take several weeks.
Once that’s done, the turbines will begin generating power to Block Island and the mainland via a 20- mile cable installed by National Grid, the utility that provides electric power to Rhode Island.
The $ 300 million wind farm is relatively small, with 30 megawatts of capacity, enough to power about 17,000 homes in Rhode Island, including dwellings on Block Island, where costly diesel fuel is used to keep the lights on.
The farm’s impact may be much larger as it demonstrates the potential for offshore wind energy while coastal states such as Rhode Island, Massachusetts and New York look increasingly to renewable energy to reduce their carbon emissions.
“It’s really difficult for a utility to say, ‘ We’d like to see you build a couple of hundred megawatts’ if no one has even been successful building 1 megawatt offshore,” Grybowski said. “Utilities have seen the success of the Block Island project. That makes them comfortable with this new resource.”
Grybowski is gearing up for his company’s next big undertaking, one with the potential for up to 200 turbines with 1 gigawatt of capacity in 256 square miles of federal waters 30 miles southeast of Montauk, N. Y.
The Long Island Power Au- thority recently announced plans to acquire 90 megawatts of capacity from 15 Deepwater Wind turbines in the area, though the financial terms need to be worked out.
If the deal is struck, Deepwater Wind could supply the electricity by 2022, including two battery units to store power for peak demand.
The potential for offshore wind energy spreads beyond the Northeast. The U. S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management ( BOEM) awarded 11 commercial wind energy leases off the Atlantic coast, though project development is much further behind the Block Island venture in other areas.
There’s interest on the West Coast, too, despite deep waters that make projects off California, Oregon and Washington more challenging than those off the East Coast.
As he prepares to move ahead, Grybowski wants to employ more U. S.- based contractors in building wind energy farms and rely less on firms that are from Europe, where wind farms dot offshore waters.
The Block Island Wind Farm has given a lift to the Rhode Island economy, employing about 300 state residents in the project, from ironworkers to scientists, Grybowski said.
Workers travel to the turbines aboard a $ 4 million catamaran built in Bristol, R. I., by Blount Boats and operated by Rhode Island Fast Ferry.
“They see this as not just one project but an opportunity to get into a new field,” Grybowski said of local contractors.
“It’s opening up a new industry for them.”
“A lot’s happened over the last year. I feel like the industry has really turned the corner.” Jeff Grybowski, CEO of Deepwater Wind