An offshore wind farm in the North Sea. Photo courtesy of Harald Pettersen/Statoil/CC BY-2.0
Vineyard Wind on Monday vowed that it will move forward with its $2.8 billion, 84-turbine wind farm project despite a new delay caused by the federal government, though the project will take shape on a new, yet-to-be-determined timeline.
The U.S. Department of the Interior and Bureau of Ocean Energy Management on Friday put a freeze on a crucial environmental impact statement for Vineyard Wind, once slated to be the first commercial-scale offshore wind farm in America, so they can study the wider impacts of an offshore wind industry that is quickly ramping up.
Vineyard Wind officials had said in July that the entire project would be at risk if the federal government did not issue the permit by the end of August and the latest delay is likely to upend the supply chain, financing and construction timeline for the project chosen by the Baker administration and state utility companies to fulfill part of a 2016 clean energy law.
Vineyard Wind – a joint venture of Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners and Avangrid Renewables – on Monday said its shareholders had “affirmed a commitment to deliver a proposed 800-megawatt wind farm off the coast of Massachusetts, albeit with a delayed project schedule.”
Project officials have been working with contractors and financiers to rework the timeline – and Gov. Charlie Baker has spoken with Vice President Mike Pence about the project – but a new schedule has not yet been determined.
“We were less than four months away from launching a new industry in the United States, so we thank the more than 50 US companies already awarded a contract or currently bidding on contracts, the financial institutions engaged in raising more than $2 billion in capital, and the first-class, global contractors that have joined us in planning for the first large-scale offshore wind farm in America,” Vineyard Wind CEO Lars Pedersen said in a press release. “We remain committed to delivering that ambitious target.”
Cryptically, Vineyard Wind said it will use the time during the latest delay to “to further improve the project and enhance its many benefits, to the extent feasible.”
An initial version of Vineyard Wind’s press release had Pedersen saying Vineyard Wind would meet its targets but “in a different configuration.” That line was inadvertently included in the quote, a Vineyard Wind official said, and there has been no discussion of changing the configuration of the wind farm’s turbines at this point.
The configuration of the project’s turbines has been a point of contention as Vineyard Wind has sought to shore up consent from the fishing industry. Fishing interests have taken issue with how Vineyard Wind planned to orient its turbines from northwest to southeast rather than from east to west and the amount of space between turbines.
The company said that it has not received any documentation detailing BOEM’s supplemental analysis announced Friday but said that it “is clear that the timing of such an analysis is not compatible with the original timeline that has been communicated to Vineyard Wind since March 2018, which Vineyard Wind used to build its delivery schedule.”
Vineyard Wind had been planning to financially close on its project and begin on-shore construction work this year, put the first turbine into the seabed in 2021 and have the wind farm generating electricity in 2022.
BOEM gave no timeline for its supplemental review, but federal officials had previously said they were looking at Vineyard Wind within a review window that extends into March 2020. It is unclear whether that timeline has changed due to the supplemental analysis. BOEM did not respond to inquiries from the News Service on Monday.
