The nation’s largest offshore wind energy project is not easy to get a good look at. Vineyard Wind is 15 miles off Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. The project is still under construction, but began delivering power in January.
GBH’s Craig LeMoult managed to get on a boat and see the project up close on Monday, and joined All Things Considered guest host Judie Yuill to describe what he saw. What follows is a lightly edited transcript.
Judie Yuill: First of all, how is it that you made it out to the Vineyard Wind site yesterday?
Craig LeMoult: I was one of about 15 journalists from public media stations that got to be on a boat that was chartered by a partnership the stations are involved in called the New England News Collaborative. There were also several experts on board to offer their insights on what we were seeing. We left from Falmouth yesterday morning and it took about 2 hours to motor out to the Vineyard Wind project, which is 35 miles off the mainland.
Yuill: And you were able to get up close to the turbines?
LeMoult: Yeah, the boat was able to go in between the turbines, some of which are done, some are still under construction. When it’s all done, this project will have 62 turbines, and the foundations have all been put in, but about half of them are completed at this point.
Yuill: So what was it like?
LeMoult: The thing that’s really just striking is the size of these things. One of the experts on board was Sanjay Arwade, who teaches about wind turbines like this as a Civil Engineering professor at UMass Amherst’s Wind Energy Center. But he’d never seen a project like this in person until yesterday.
Sanjay Arwade [prerecorded]: “So, I mean, by far the word that is in my mind is scale. It just — it’s just so giant.”
LeMoult: The turbines are 853 feet tall, nearly 3 Statues of Liberty. And that’s just what you see above the water. Of course they continue underwater and are hammered down into the sea bed below. And the three blades are over 350 feet long. They’re arranged neatly in rows, with about a nautical mile between them. When you’re out there on the water, a mile doesn’t actually feel all that far.
Yuill: And this is the project where a turbine blade collapsed in July.
LeMoult: That’s right, one of those huge blades failed, sending debris washing ashore on Nantucket and the Cape. The blades are made by the company GE Vernova and the cause of the incident is being investigated. They’ve resumed some construction of turbines, but for now, they’ve suspended power generation at the project, which means the turbines weren’t spinning when we were out there yesterday.
Yuill: Despite that setback, there’s a lot of hope about the promise of this project, right?
LeMoult: For sure. One of the experts on the boat yesterday was Amber Hewett, who is senior director for offshore wind energy at the National Wildlife Federation. She was seeing the turbines for the first time, too, and said she was emotional.
Amber Hewett [prerecorded]: I’m from Massachusetts, so I think that’s probably where the emotion comes from. A little bit of pride, a little bit of 'finally.’ Massachusetts has been trying to make offshore wind happen for over 20 years. We’ve endured setback after setback after setback. The developers of this project had to persist through the Trump administration, through almost not getting their federal permits, and really just stuck to it relentlessly, until we could be here in this moment.
Yuill: At the same time, there are some real concerns about the potential environmental impacts of projects like this, right?
LeMoult: That’s true. One concern is whether there could be an impact on species like the North Atlantic Right Whale. There are only about 360 known right whales still alive, so any impact on them could be significant. One of the people on board yesterday was Michael Moore of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, who’s a real expert on right whales. He said one thing they don’t know is to what extent harvesting energy from the wind might change conditions in the water for copepods - which are the tiny crustaceans that right whales feed on.
Michael Moore [prerecorded]: We don’t know. But the suspicion is that the changes that it could be bringing about are of a much smaller scale than the current dynamic changes that are going on through climate change. And so every year these systems look differently. And in so doing, it’s hard to get a sense of how that could be an impact.
LeMoult: Moore said a bigger concern than the operation of wind farms is the impact of their construction - especially the vessel traffic and the sound of driving those pylons into the sea floor. He said there are precautions being taken to do that kind of work when right whales are not believed to be nearby. But he acknowledged there are a lot of open questions.
Yuill: This is just one wind farm. What’s the expectation looking into the future about how much more we can expect offshore?
LeMoult: Yeah, the expectation is this is really just the beginning. You know, Amber Hewett noted earlier that Vineyard Wind persisted through the Trump presidency and Trump has been famously hostile to wind energy. So the outcome of the current presidential election could dictate the pace at which wind power moves forward. But the UMass civil engineer, Sanjay Arwade seemed confident wind power will continue to progress, regardless of that election’s outcome. At one point, he offered his vision of what he expects to see by 2050.
Arwade: What I would expect to see at that point is dozens of individual projects, dozens of wind farms and thousands of individual turbines along the coast, let’s say from Virginia to Maine, all of which are generating power and sending it to the onshore grid and powering homes with no emissions.
LeMoult: Just yesterday, the federal department of the interior announced it will hold an offshore wind energy lease sale in October for eight areas on the Outer Continental Shelf in the Gulf of Maine, including off Massachusetts.
And it’s going to be interesting to see if this burgeoning industry grows the economy here in the state. Last month , there was a groundbreaking in Salem for a new offshore wind terminal. Notably, that new terminal will be at former the site of the Brayton Point coal-fired power plant.
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