Big ships and big dollars lie ahead for wind energy developers looking to cash in on East Coast waters
By Kirk Moore in WorkBoat
Off the New Jersey coast, the bright red hull of the Fugro Enterprise has become a familiar sight to commercial fishermen who pull shellfish dredges and tend gillnets.
Plodding along at around 4 knots, the 170’x40’x11′ survey vessel is making detailed geotechnical surveys for the Ocean Wind energy project, planned by Ørsted to accommodate towering wind turbines that would supply New Jersey with its first 1,100 megawatts of renewable energy generated by offshore wind.
To New Jersey’s renewable power advocates and Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy, the work is a welcome sight. It’s the first step toward building what they hope will be 3,500 MW of offshore power by 2030.
For people in the state’s seafood industry — including the long-established and profitable scallop and surf clam fleets — the big red boat portends a new struggle to stay in business.
“The impact to New Jersey will be devastating if the commercial fishing industry is displaced at all,” warned Brick Wenzel, a captain who fishes out of Point Pleasant Beach, N.J., as state utility regulators prepared measure so Ørsted and other companies could bid for power contracts.
The U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) and Coast Guard have put wind developers on notice that they will need to plan for wide, safe vessel traffic lanes through future turbine arrays.
But that’s just one challenge ahead for an industry, born in the waters of northern Europe that now looks to develop potentially the richest wind energy market in the world.
In U.S. waters, offshore wind developers face hurdles of finding enough heavy-lift construction vessels, and even physical space in U.S. ports to accommodate the coming generation of giant wind turbines.
LOTS OF WIND, RIGHT SPOT
The East Coast between southern New England and the Carolinas is so attractive for offshore energy development because it has consistent year-round wind close to “load centers” — Boston, New York and other cities of the eastern megapolis, said James Bennett, who heads BOEM’s renewable energy program.
The pioneer was Deepwater Wind (now part of Ørsted) with its five-turbine, 30-MW Block Island Wind Farm of Rhode Island that went online in 2016. The same year Equinor (then known as Statoil) won a 79,350-acre lease for its Empire Wind project, tucked between shipping lanes into New York Harbor.
Two years later companies bid almost double what Equinor spent per acre to secure three more leases south of Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., for $135 million each in December 2018.
“I think what you’ll see with these leases in place is tremendous acceleration down to Virginia,” said Bennett.
With that market signal, U.S. shipbuilders and other would-be suppliers have been stepping up with their offerings. Two major trade shows, the International Partnering Forum 2019 presented by the Business Network for Offshore Wind in New York City in April, and the U.S. Offshore Wind conference in Boston in June, both counted packed houses with around 1,400 attendees each.
In May Ørsted and partner WindServe Marine LLC, an affiliate of New York-based Reinauer Group, announced plans to build a pair of crew transfer vessels (CTVs). The BMT Group-designed catamarans will be the second and third U.S.-flag CTVs since Blount Boats, Warren, R.I., built the CTV Atlantic Pioneer to service the Block Island turbines.
