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Massachusetts plots course on offshore wind with port study

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From reNews

Massachusetts has released a detailed assessment of 18 waterfront sites from Boston to Fall River that could be developed to support construction of 1.6GW of offshore wind over the next 10 years.

The Massachusetts Clean Energy Center commissioned the ports and infrastructure study carried out by Ramboll Environ, Apex and other local engineering companies, the University of Massachusetts (Boston) Urban Harbors Institute and Tufts University.

Companies in line to supply Mass. offshore wind industry

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From the New Bedford Wind Energy Center

The rush is on.

Companies eager to supply goods and services to the new offshore wind industry that will be built in the waters off the coast of southern Massachusetts jammed a forum in Newton, MA, today.

Organized by the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, the Offshore Wind Supply Chain Forum brought together three of the developers that control leases in

Offshore wind developers and representatives of companies interested in becoming part of the supply chain for the new industry at a Massachusetts Clean Energy Center forum in Newton on Wednesday, May 31.

federal waters marked for the development of offshore wind.

Among the possible supply chain companies represented were international giants GE Offshore and Siemens, along with companies from around the US, including Gulf Island Fabrication (Louisiana), Ventower Industries (Michigan) and EEW Special Pipes Construction (Germany).

The developers and companies wishing to be part of the supply chain came together to swap information and arrange follow-up meetings. They heard  speeches from Matt Beaton, Massachusetts secretary of energy; Jay Ash, the state secretary of housing and economic development; and state Rep. Pat Haddad, House speaker pro tempore and key proponent of state legislation requiring public utilities to purchase 1,600MW of offshore wind power over the next decade.

Jeff Grybowski, CEO of Deepwater Wind, which built the first offshore wind farm off the coast of Block Island (and is looking to build off Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Maryland), said about one-third of the goods and services his company used in building the project came from greater Rhode Island, one-third from Germany and the rest from companies serving the oil and gas industry in the Gulf of Mexico.

Erich Stephens, the CEO of Vineyard Wind, owned by Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners (CIP) said his company  is committed to building both a local supply chain and workforce capacity in Massachusetts.

“CIP is in it for the long term,” he said.  “(We) need balance between leaning too much on Europe and using Massachusetts companies as supply chain.”

DONG Energy’s Fred Zalcman said a successful supply chain will include partners who can help the industry in “achieving scale, standardization and (building) long-

term relationships within the host community, like in the Hull/Humber region” of England, epicenter of the United Kingdom’s multi-billion dollar offshore wind industry.

 

 

Coal is about to disappear from New England

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From E&E News

SOMERSET, Mass. — For Pat Haddad, a good day is one when she returns home from the state Legislature to see steam rising from Brayton Point Power Station’s twin 497-foot-tall cooling towers. New England’s largest coal plant has long powered the economy in Haddad’s hometown of Somerset, a community of 18,000 people on the south coast of Massachusetts.

But good days have been few and far between lately. Soon, they will be gone altogether. Brayton Point will extinguish its boilers for the final time tomorrow. When it does, coal will have all but disappeared from this six-state region of 14 million people. Two small and seldom-used coal plants in New Hampshire will be all that remains of a once-mighty industry.

“The sun is literally and figuratively setting,” said Haddad, a Democrat who represents Somerset and three other communities in the Massachusetts House of Representatives. “It’s so hard to see.”

Read more here…

Offshore wind farms magnet for fish and fishermen

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Last December, the nation’s first offshore wind farm went online. Located 4 miles off Block Island, R.I., these five turbines are undoubtedly a harbinger of things to come in terms of renewable-energy resources. But perhaps even more intriguing is their future as fishing hotspots. That windmills can generate electricity is fact. That they can act as FADs (Fish Aggregating Devices) is somewhat open to conjecture, but optimism abounds.

Up and down the East Coast, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) has designated Wind Energy Areas. Some are just in the planning stage, other areas have been leased. Off the coast of Long Island, N.Y., for example, there are three current proposals for wind-farm construction on a much larger scale than the one off Block. In January, the Long Island Power Authority approved developer Deepwater Wind’s plan to build 15 such turbines between Long Island and Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts. Even more are planned off the South Shore of Long Island.

 There are environmental and economic trade-offs to offshore wind energy, but what does such potential large-scale windfarm construction mean specifically for anglers? Read more here:

DONG Energy leaves oil and gas industry for offshore wind

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From Reuters

Danish utility and offshore wind farm developer DONG Energy has agreed to sell its oil and gas business to petrochemicals firm Ineos for $1.3 billion, it said on Wednesday, the latest in a string of North Sea deals.

The sale is a blow to shipping group A.P. Moller-Maersk, which had sought to merge its oil and gas business with DONG into a company worth more than $10 billion as part of a major restructuring.

For DONG Energy, the world’s biggest operator of offshore wind power, the sale marks a step away from fossil fuels as it seeks to focus solely on offshore wind.
Read more…

From E&P magazine

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From E&P magazine

HOUSTON—Technology used by the oil and natural gas industry including jackets and tension-leg platforms (TLPs) have benefited the offshore wind industry, which could provide a power source that could help fill electrical generation gaps in the U.S.

Alana Duerr, the lead for offshore wind within the Wind Energy Technologies Office at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), said the DOE’s goal is to build a business case for the resource, address challenges and help reduce costs, enabling development in all coastal regions and optimizing grid integration and transmission.

The gap between current energy generation from existing U.S. wind facilities—land-based and offshore—and growing electricity demand is about 2,400 terawatt hours per year by 2050, Duerr said at OTC 2017. “While offshore wind has the resource to fill all of that, we’re not suggesting that it will. We’re suggesting that we want offshore wind to be part of the mix that actually fills that gap by 2050.”

Duerr noted there would need to be a “significant amount of upgrades to transport electricity from the middle portion of the country where there’s a lot of really good land-based wind resource, out to the coast where there’s the energy demand. So that’s why we’re looking at places off the East Coast that have the population density, the electricity demand and also the offshore wind resource.”

Much potential lies on the nation’s coasts, where about 80% of the electricity demand is centered, she said. “Off of those regions there [are] approximately 2,000 gigawatts [GW] of offshore wind energy that could be accessed and exploited with the technology that we have today,” she said.

New Bedford’s new sister city bond: offshore wind

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From the Grimsby (England) Telegraph

Grimsby has forged official links with New Bedford as America’s biggest fishing port seeks to embrace offshore wind.

A large delegation of influential representatives from the public and private sector has visited North East Lincolnshire from the Massachusetts city, with a Memorandum of Agreement signed between the two.

The US visitors are keen to learn how Grimsby became the poster child for offshore wind operations and maintenance for the UK, as it looks towards installing an initial 1,600 MW – roughly what Grimsby will control come 2018.

Mayor of North East Lincolnshire, Councillor Christina McGilligan-Fell, council leader Councillor Ray Oxby and chief executive Rob Walsh welcomed 24 officials from the eastern seaboard, including Mayor of City of New Bedford, Jon F Mitchell.

 Speaking ahead of the signing of official documents, cementing the ‘special relationship,’ Mr Oxby said: “This visit is a symbol of our changing times; New Bedford is a fishing town that like Grimsby has seen the opportunity to grasp the future benefits of working with the offshore wind industry to generate better economic and social prospects for the local community.

“They have travelled a very long way and have chosen to partner with Grimsby because they see the work that we have undertaken as a port, and town, to work with the wind industry as a best practice exemplar.

“In this case imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.”

Describing offshore wind as “only part of the story” and aware of an early morning visit to Grimsby Fish Market, Mr Oxby said: “They met with other representatives from our seafood cluster and I hope they are excited about the potential for mutual benefit and growth.”

Dong Energy is another common factor, with the Danish giant opening an office in Boston, as the North American HQ. Tours of the Westermost Rough operations and maintenance facility and the equivalent for E.on’s Humber Gateway offshore wind farm were also taken, so too HCF Catch at Stallingborough and Humber UTC in Scunthorpe.

It is not the first visit from the State, or the US, with previous tours in September last year and March, leading up to this significant milestone.

Mayor Mitchell said: “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and what a great place for us to imitate. Grimsby has such a rich, rich history in seafaring, and such a strong identity as a port.

“In New Bedford, we are taking the future in our own hands, just as Grimsby has done over the last couple of decades, and that’s the way the world is these days.

“We have to think big, be pro-active and aggressive, seize good ideas and share them where opportunities present themselves.

“If there is a place in the UK to be partnered with it is certainly Grimsby. We are pleased to be here.”

As well as presenting the mayor and council leader with a written history of New Bedford and a commemorative pen, golf balls were also given, as the world-leading manufacturer Titleist is also based there.

“We do golf balls as well as fish,” Mayor Mitchell joked.

Some of the party are staying on in the region to attend Offshore Wind Connections, the Team Humber Marine Alliance annual conference taking place at Bridlington Spa this week, with full coverage on www.humberbusiness.com, our dedicated business website and official event media partner.

Mark O’Reilly, chairman and chief executive of THMA, who witnessed the signing, said: “We have a real cross-section of delegates from business, asking a lot of questions about the workforce, skills, training and experience of how you develop supply chains. They are here to learn from us.

“We have talked about what we did bringing people in from existing roles, maritime, ports, engineering, and bringing them under the umbrella.

“They are now in that religious phase, getting the believers on board.

“This is the first agreement signed, and Grimsby is leading the way in many respects, with existing connections with Bremerhaven (Germany) and now New Bedford.

“We are building a transatlantic bridge of offshore wind.”

 

Trump’s politics unlikely to halt US offshore wind growth

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Since last November’s presidential election, most of the news headlines surrounding the energy industry have had to do with President Donald Trump’s stated preference for oil and gas exploration off the US coastline and the resurrection of the coal industry.

That has injected worry on the part of those who favor a national move toward renewable energy sources, including offshore wind. Indeed, many states have passed legislation or stated goals that would require they meet renewable energy objectives, which outwardly would seem to place them at odds with the Trump energy agenda.

However, market realities — sharp declines in the cost of offshore wind in Europe, tens of thousand of new clean-energy jobs, and the move toward renewables by US energy producers — may prove to be powerful change agents within the Trump administration.

The federal Bureau of Ocean Management continues to hold lease auctions for tracts of ocean water targeted for potential wind farms along the East Coast from North Carolina to New England. That could include another 400,000 acres south of Martha’s Vineyard following unsolicited applications by two international energy giants, Statoil and PNE Wind. Already, three developers — Deepwater Wind (builder of a recently operational demonstration project off Block Island), DONG Energy (partnered with Eversource) and Vineyard Wind (which recently sold a 50-percent stake to Avangrid Renewables) — are expected to bid on the sale of 1,600 MW of power to Massachusetts utilities.

 

Some of the turbine blades at the Siemens blade manufacturing center in Hull, England, where offshore wind is powering economic growth.

In addition, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, long a friend of the oil and gas industry while he was Texas governor, also promoted clean energy policies there.

in his nearly 15 years as governor, Texas wind power generation climbed from just over 100 megawatts to 11,000 megawatts by the time he left office, according to the Washington Times. Today, Texas gets nearly 14 percent of its power from onshore wind.

Further, a just-released, highly detailed study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which is part of Perry’s Energy Department, recently assessed the economic potential of some 7,000 potential sites for offshore wind in the US.

Not surprisingly, it found that the economic potential for the Northeast — especially Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Maine — is the highest in the nation due to the close proximity of dependable offshore winds and the existing high price structure of energy generation and transmission from New England’s energy suppliers.

The report is anything but easy reading, but you will come away knowing that the US has the potential to harvest huge quantities of offshore wind in an environment of ever-lowering costs achieved by anticipated technological gains and an established supply chain.

And here in New Bedford, we will be right at the center of a new, clean-energy industry that the Trump administration ought to love — if only for the 34,000 jobs it is expected to create over the next 30 years.

Offshore wind transforming English manufacturing cities

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The Port of Hull, England, hosts a new Siemens turbine blade manufacturing center. Shown here are 30-story turbine towers ready for deployment, along with nacelles, which weigh 412 tons.

Less than a decade ago, the offshore wind industry was a tantalizing dream in the Humber Region of England, a three-hour train ride north of London.

Today, the region is the hub of a booming offshore wind sector that represents more than 7 billion pounds of investment, thousands of jobs and opportunity for hundreds of local small businesses.

New Bedford Mayor Jon Mitchell, EDC Chairman Anthony Sapienza and Wind Energy Center Director Paul Vigeant led a trade mission to the Humber Region last week to get a first hand view of how the industry is transforming once-struggling cities along the Hull River Estuary.

The cities of Hull and Grimsby, which are part of the Humber region, were like New Bedford in many ways. Hull, a city of about 250,000, had been the whaling capital of the United Kingdom. Grimsby, with 95,000 inhabitants, was the center of the nation’s commercial fishing industry until Iceland extended its claim over the cod fishery out to 200 miles, essentially excluding Britain’s fishermen from fishing in the best waters for cod.

Both communities had been economically stagnant and felt forgotten by more thriving parts of the country until the offshore wind industry began to stir, thanks in part to government policies encouraging renewable wind to complement the UK’s oil and natural gas industries, centered near Aberdeen.

Today, the Humber Region is the focus of England’s growing offshore wind industry, which leads the world in offshore wind power production, as well as in plans for new wind farms. A new Siemens blade manufacturing facility in Hull already has 800 workers and will will employ a total of about 1,000 by year end. Grimsby, where Dong and E.On have significant presences, has become has become the center of operation and maintenance for offshore wind farms, creating 400 jobs, with an estimated 1,100 by 2025.

The region has drawn more than $9 billion dollars, at the current exchange rate, in offshore wind-related investments, with Grimsby alone seeing $38.7 million over the past three years.

With the UK legally bound to supply 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020, the total offshore wind investment is only expected to rise. Nationwide, the sector is expected to bring upwards of $142 billion in investments by 2023.

This has already provided opportunity for Humber Region companies within the supply chain, some of which have been started by former fishermen who now provide specialized help and trained employees for the new industry.

In addition, colleges and universities are training engineers to work within the new industry, and training organizations update the skills of existing and future wind turbine technicians.

The UK last month had its first full day of energy generated without the aid of coal. As the country moves toward a future powered increasingly by renewables, offshore wind is expected to bring continued prosperity to The Humber.

Mark O’Reilly, CEO of Team Humber Marine Alliance, right, talks about the new Siemens turbine blade manufacturing plant in Hull with New Bedford Mayor Jon Mitchell.

 

 

Birth of a new base industry in New Bedford

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It took a century for the epicenter of the whaling industry to shift from Nantucket to New Bedford, and it took half a century for whaling to give way to textiles here.

Things happen a lot faster now, thanks to technology, instant communications and global competition, and by the time this decade is over, the US offshore wind industry will have evolved from a concept to a base energy industry along the East Coast.

Listen to New Bedford Economic Development Director Derek Santos (above) and Wind Energy Center Director Paul Vigeant (below) talk about New Bedford’s position at the center of a new base industry that will supply vast amounts of clean, renewable energy and employ an estimated 43,000 workers by 2030.

1213 Purchase Street
2nd Floor
New Bedford, MA 02740
508.991.3122