A Giant Wind Farm Is Taking Root Off Massachusetts
The offshore energy project will have turbines taller than any building in Boston, but they will be barely visible from Martha’s Vineyard.
By Stanley Reed and Ivan Penn, The New York Times, June 27, 2023
…The $4 billion project, known as Vineyard Wind, is expected to start generating electricity by year’s end…
In the coming months, 62 turbines, each up to 850 feet high (taller than any building in Boston) with blades about 350 feet long, will be planted on a sweep of seabed 15 miles off Martha’s Vineyard…Vineyard Wind says its machines will crank out enough power to light up 400,000 homes…
Europe has thousands of offshore turbines, and so much of the expertise and equipment used in Vineyard Wind’s construction, including the specialized vessels used to hammer the turbine towers into the seabed, is from across the Atlantic…
In fact, a series of wind farms are planned that could add up to around 75 times the capacity of Vineyard Wind, according to Wood Mackenzie, a consulting firm. About 80 percent of this acreage is off the East Coast.
To Christian Skakkebaek, a founder of Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, the East Coast “in many ways looks like the North Sea, with a shallow seabed, sandy bottom and high wind speeds.”…[end quote]
Fishermen are complaining because the wind farm area won’t be safe for their boats and gear. What the article didn’t say is that the wind farm site, which is a prime summer location for squids, will become a de facto protected area where sea life can breed and live.
The east coast wind power would be very close to some of the highest power-consuming areas in the U.S. Transmission will be much easier than bringing it in from the central U.S. which also has a lot of wind power potential.
Wendy