The Captain Les Eldridge used to chase bass and tuna out of New Bedford. Now, the vessel has a new role in the nation’s emerging offshore wind industry.
“We’re bringing people out to the offshore wind farms,” said Ed Anthes-Washburn, whose company Coast Line Transfers manages the vessel. “People and stuff.”
The Captain Les Eldridge now ferries about 100 construction workers and their food out to the Revolution Wind farm each week, which is about a four-hour steam from New Bedford.
Anthes-Washburn said Coast Line Transfers lost a similar contract with another offshore wind farm last summer, during an industry wide contraction in the U.S. that saw planned wind farms scrapped up and down the East Coast. On Friday, Anthes-Washburn will find out if southern New England is ready to rebuild that pipeline of canceled offshore wind projects. Officials in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut are expected to announce whether they are ready to move forward with a series of proposed offshore wind farms that developers submitted through a tri-state solicitation process in March.
“If all the projects get chosen, that is a pipeline for almost the next 10 years, if not longer,” Anthes-Washburn said. “So it is important.”
The news will have broader economic and environmental implications for people across New England. States have already spent hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars retrofitting port facilities for offshore wind construction. In return, these states are counting on the industry to create thousands of jobs and generate enough clean electricity to wean them off fossil fuels.
Anne Reynolds, a vice president at the American Clean Power Association, a trade group that speaks for the world’s largest renewable energy companies, said it’s not possible for New England states to meet their climate goals without developing more offshore wind farms.
“There’s just not another option at scale that would meet the electricity demand and meet the decarbonisation goals in New England, in New York or New Jersey,” Reynolds said.
As recently as 2021, Massachusetts officials expected that offshore wind would provide a quarter of the state’s electricity needs by 2027. Rhode Island was expecting to source half of its electricity from offshore wind farms within a similar timeframe. But many of the projects those states were counting on to hit those goals were canceled last year.
To understand why so many projects failed to move forward, it helps to have some background on how electricity gets sold in the northeast. Most power plants sell their electricity at a fluctuating market price, but offshore wind farms sell electricity at a fixed price, which developers agree to years before construction even starts. This arrangement offers the offshore wind industry more stability, making it possible to secure financing that might otherwise be unobtainable. But it also means that if construction costs go up, there’s no way for developers to make that money back.
Last year, offshore wind developers that agreed to sell electricity at low prices before the pandemic found their projects had become unprofitable as supplies and labor suddenly got more expensive. Reynolds said the war in Ukraine also caused a spike in demand for offshore wind energy, which made it more competitive to secure the types of specialized boats that install turbines.
“It was clearly a combination of inflation that was unprecedented, interest rate increases that were rapid, increasing demand for offshore wind vessels and components around the world, especially because of the European interest in getting off of Russian natural gas, and also a learning curve for how long it takes to get through the permitting process,” Reynolds said.
But a year after the northeast U.S. lost much of its offshore wind pipeline, the industry is showing signs of recovery. In New York and New Jersey, state officials revived stalled projects by agreeing to pay higher electricity prices that can now fluctuate if construction costs keep rising.
Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island are using the same pricing strategy to try to rebuild their canceled pipeline of offshore wind projects. By also offering to buy electricity together in bulk, the states in southern New England are hoping to receive cheaper bids than Rhode Island received in a failed solicitation by itself last year.
New Bedford Mayor Jon Mitchell, a strong proponent of the offshore wind industry, said it remains to be seen whether that move yields a new round of viable projects.
For Mitchell, Friday’s announcement is more than just a referendum on the region’s climate goals. Massachusetts taxpayers have funded a $133 million pier in New Bedford for assembling offshore wind turbines, and Mitchell said five other piers in the city are undergoing expensive renovations to host other kinds of offshore wind activity.
“We’re in the midst of a pipeline of investment both public and private in the port in New Bedford that’s greater than anything we’ve seen since New Bedford was the center of the whaling industry in the world,” Mitchell said.
If New England states don’t have good news to announce Friday, New Bedford’s offshore wind piers could wind up sitting empty for much longer than expected.
