Sean D. Elliot/The Day via AP
A National Wildlife Federation group takes a boat tour of the Block Island, Rhode Island, Wind Farm, America’s first offshore project, June 2017.
This week, the Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) approved an 800-megawatt, $2.8 billion wind energy project in Massachusetts waters south of Martha’s Vineyard. The project, named Vineyard Wind, is the first utility-scale offshore proposal to clear federal regulatory hurdles. While it’s a big step in the direction of the 30 gigawatts of installed wind power that President Biden wants to see up and running by 2030, its long-in-coming approval is a stark reminder of the consequences of delays and missed opportunities in America’s race against climate change.
Vineyard Wind can’t quite escape the shadow of Cape Wind, the first and so far the longest-running drama in the travails of the offshore wind industry. In 2001, Boston-based energy project developer James Gordon unveiled plans for a 130-turbine wind farm that was projected to generate 1,500 gigawatt hours of electricity. If its turbines had ever started up, Cape Wind would have been the world’s largest wind farm. (Hornsea 1 in British waters is currently the world’s largest, the Europeans having left the United States behind in wind power development beginning in the 1990s.)
Gordon’s announcement was the high point of the Cape Wind saga. Over the course of nearly 20 years, the project imploded in slow motion, undone by stronger-than-usual state and federal agency frictions, the high costs of renewable energy of the period, and its powerful opponents, up, down, and across the political spectrum. Sen. Ted Kennedy, the late patriarch of the Kennedy clan, emerged as the face of the opposition. Kennedy took exception to the Nantucket Sound location between Cape Cod and the islands of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, which also happened to be within the viewscape of his family’s Hyannisport compound.
His nephew, Robert Kennedy Jr., is an environmental lawyer who’s supported wind energy, just not Cape Wind. Conservative moneyman Bill Koch, another property owner, donated generously to the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, an anti–Cape Wind environmental advocacy group that tied the project up in legal knots. The $2 billion project folded in 2017. Only two small projects have been constructed since the Cape Wind debacle, one off the coast of Block Island, Rhode Island, and a second off the coast of Virginia.
Vineyard Wind is the beneficiary of a radical transformation in the national renewable-energy landscape. Coastline wind resources in the Atlantic Ocean are the strongest offshore in the United States. Wind developers have zeroed in on Massachusetts, since the Bay State has the best wind resources and the potential to produce many times more energy than residents consume. Most importantly, wind energy costs have plummeted in the past 20 years, and costs per kilowatt hour are now competitive with fossil fuels.
Unlike the years of litigation that led electric utilities to abandon contracts with Cape Wind, Vineyard Wind’s experience has been smoother. The company has purchased power agreements with a number of electricity companies and ISO New England, the region’s power grid operator. About 10 percent of the Bay State’s energy needs will be met by the project, which will power about 400,000 homes and eliminate carbon emissions equal to those produced by 325,000 cars. Eight other projects are in various stages of development along the Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut coastlines.
The siting issues that energized opposition two decades ago and still preoccupy both offshore and onshore wind farms have not gone away. Vineyard Wind took an out-of-sight, out-of-mind approach to deep-pocketed malcontents fretting about their ocean views. Consisting of no more than 84 turbines, the project is located 15 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard (which itself lies south of Cape Cod)—well out of the viewscape of homeowners on the Cape and with negligible impacts on the ocean horizons of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard residents and beachgoers. Cape Wind, by contrast, would have been just six miles from Cape Cod shores.
The Vineyard Wind developers even matched the color of the turbines to the prevailing sea and atmospheric optics. The BOEM’s decision notes that Vineyard Wind “has selected a turbine paint color that matches the most frequent color of the horizon (light gray) with a matte finish to prevent sunlight from reflecting off the turbines to minimize the impact from the shore.”
It doesn’t hurt that the affected municipalities walked away with generous community agreements. Barnstable, the largest town on Cape Cod, landed a 25-year deal with Vineyard Wind to site the onshore connection for an underwater transmission cable, for which it will be paid a tidy $32 million. The city of New Bedford in southeastern Massachusetts will finally see its marine terminal, built specifically for wind turbine staging and constructed in anticipation of launch of the Cape Wind project, put to its intended use.
Commercial fishing interests, however, remain some of the most vocal opponents of wind projects. Vineyard Wind was able to site its turbines on an east-to-west grid at least one nautical mile apart, despite objections from fisheries industry groups and companies that wanted wider sea lanes. (The BOEM decision noted that the federal government expected fishermen to “abandon” the 75,614-acre area where the turbines will be constructed, resulting in $14 million in losses to fishermen. Vineyard Wind agreed to mitigate losses, but industry groups claim the package is inadequate.)
Vineyard Wind will be a necessary but insufficient step toward a clean-energy New England. “We really can’t meet net zero in New England without offshore wind,” says Susannah Hatch, the clean-energy coalition director for the Environmental League of Massachusetts. Hatch notes that the Bay State alone needs at least 15 gigawatts of wind to reach net zero by 2050, while New England needs 30 gigawatts to meet that goal. Hitting these climate targets remains a monumental challenge. Massachusetts is aiming for a 45 percent reduction in gross emissions below 1990 levels by 2030. Mayflower Wind, a second wind installation (the 804-megawatt project is a joint venture of Shell and EDPR Offshore North America), plans to launch a state and federal permitting process next year. On May 10, the same day as the Vineyard Wind announcement, Massachusetts issued a request for proposals of up to 1,600 megawatts, inching the state closer toward its overall clean-energy goal of 3.2 gigawatts of wind online by 2030.
Two days after the Vineyard Wind decision, the EPA released a roundup of indicators detailing the accelerating climate crisis. Greenhouse gas emissions have increased by 2 percent from 1990 to 2019 (but have decreased 12 percent since 2005). Eight of the ten warmest years on record have occurred since 1998. The droughts in the Southwest have been more long-running and severe, and the sparse rain levels and light snowfalls of the past year have contributed to getting the wildfire season off to an early start.
Across the country, heat waves are more frequent, summer temperatures higher, and single-event rainstorms stronger. The number of tropical storms and their intensity, which eastern Massachusetts watches warily, have both increased; 2020 broke records with 30 named storms and 12 that made landfall. The 130 beaches on Cape Cod that draw tourists by the thousands every summer are suffering from fast-paced erosion, fueled by these severe storms and rising seas.
“Even by meeting such significant reductions in carbon emissions, how we make our lives on Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, or Nantucket is going to be irrevocably changed [because of] rising seas due to the climate crisis—and that’s a best-case scenario,” says state Sen. Julian Cyr, who represents those locales in the legislature. Public opinion on climate change and awareness of the need to reduce carbon emissions has shifted dramatically since the Cape Wind debacle. But the first deployments of Vineyard Wind and the projects yet to come are just feathers on the scale of the climate crisis in Massachusetts and beyond.
