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.

On a chilly June day, with the Massachusetts island of Martha’s Vineyard just over the distant horizon, a low-riding, green-hulled vessel finished hammering a steel column nearly 100 feet into the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

This was the beginning of construction of the first giant wind farm off the United States coast, a project with the scale to make a large contribution to the Northeast power grid. For some of those looking on from a nearby boat, the driving in of the first piling marked a milestone they had labored to reach for two decades. The $4 billion project, known as Vineyard Wind, is expected to start generating electricity by year’s end.

“This has been really hard,” said Rachel Pachter, the chief development officer of Vineyard Offshore, the American arm of Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, a Danish renewable energy developer that is a co-owner of the wind farm. To bring a big energy project to this point near population centers requires clearing countless regulatory hurdles and heading off potential opposition and litigation. “You don’t see large infrastructure projects built in New England anymore,” she said, “and certainly not in places where they are highly visible.”

Ms. Pachter has seen the difficulties firsthand. Starting in 2002 as an intern just out of college, she worked for more than a decade on a project off Massachusetts called Cape Wind; it ultimately failed, in part because of intense opposition over the years by people like Senator Edward M. Kennedy, who died in 2009, and the billionaire William Koch. Vineyard Wind, too, has pockets of vociferous opposition. Some people in the fishing industry say turbines will make their job nearly impossible.

Ms. Pachter, though, has helped orchestrate a campaign of community outreach, job creation and funding

up to up to 850 feet high (taller than any building in Boston) with blades about 350 feet long,

Good God, that is huge.

I'm assuming they will be able to withstand hurricane force winds. They probably plan it on paper but have they been tested in the real world?

Ted Kennedy kept this wind farm from being built for years.
This is because he liked sailing in this area where the fam is being built.

I was just in Newport, RI this past weekend. I saw the platform of one of these turbines sitting one a ship at anchor in the harbor. It was huge. This was just the base that will sit on the ocean floor and stick up out of the water. The the actual turbine will be attached to it and go over 600’ in the air.

“Barely visible” if you are blind. Here’s the ugly truth about the proposed wind farm - Money Pit
https://green-oceans.org/green-oceans-one-pager
Offshore Wind farms are deteriorating quickly and after they stop working it is too expensive to get rid of them so they sit there and rot. Siemens Gamesa (wind unit) stock went down 36% on Friday.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/siemens-faces-writedown-siemens-energy-stake-after-fridays-sell-off-2023-06-23/
Offshore wind farms don’t even reduce CO2 emissions for 3 reasons, first because the production of the cement and steel used in them emits CO2, offsetting 10 to 15 percent of the CO2 savings; and second because to stabilize the grid in case the wind suddenly stops, which can happen at any time, uitilities need to have “spinning reserve” which is gas or coal fired plants that are already running and ready to be put into use generating power. Keeping these “peaker” plants running when they are not needed, wastes CO2. And third, the most efficient power plant is the combined cycle gas turbine (CCGT) which uses excess heat from the gas turbine generator to run a second steam generator. These are up to 62% efficient, but it takes several hours for these plants to generate the steam for the second cycle in order to produce the additional power. They can’t just be “switched on” and immediately produce electricity, but a “peaker” plant in spinning reserve can immediately produce power.
But “peaker” plants are only 40% efficient, so they use 50 percent more gas to produce the same electricity. A wind system with “peaker” backup uses almost as much natural gas as a combined cycle plant to produce the same amount of power. About 90 percent of the CO2 savings from wind is offset by the inefficiency of the backup and the CO2 emitted to make the turbines. And if the turbines degrade quickly like the Siemens ones are, it is even worse. Might as well take trillions of dollars and flush it.

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