Avangrid and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners will jointly develop an 800-megawatt offshore wind farm south of Martha’s Vineyard. This facility will save about $1.4 billion in a course of 20 years and it will be the first commercial-scale offshore wind farm in the US.
Namely, as a letter from the US Department of Energy Resources, the facility will provide 6.5 cents a kilowatt per hour, making the Vineyard Wind project 18% cheaper than other alternatives.
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This project comes at a time when offshore wind is expected to increase by as much as 16% per year until 2030, led by installations in the UK, Germany, Netherlands and China. The US has not yet taken advantage of this new situation, however the Vineyard Wind can close this gap.
Construction on the wind farm will start during 2019, and it is expected that it will start operations in 2021. Vineyard Wind will be able to decrease Massachusetts’s carbon emissions by over 1.6 million tons per year.
As far as Massachusetts is concerned, the state aims to install 600 megawatts of offshore wind by 2027, with lawmakers approving a legislation to double this amount earlier this week.
However, Massachusetts is not the only state who invests in offshore wind. In fact, New York started procurements of offshore wind to support New York’s goal of 2,400 megawatts of new offshore wind generation by 2030. This is the first phase of the procurements, which will obtain about 800 megawatts of offshore wind by 2019.
With this project, New York wants to make another step to obtain 50% of its electricity from renewables by 2030. As Mr. Cuomo said, this development will create thousands of jobs and fuel a $6 billion industry for New York to combat climate change.
In addition, the second US offshore wind project is closer to implementation. The Icebreaker Wind energy project proposed for Lake Erie has received a Section 401 water quality certificate of approval by Ohio’s Environmental Protection Agency, confirming compliance with marine pollution standards, and marking further a step towards the project implementation.
Icebreaker Wind is a wind energy project -the first offshore wind facility in the Great Lakes, the first freshwater wind farm in North America, and only the second offshore wind project in the entire US- to be located eight miles off of the coast of downtown Cleveland.
