Moments before Tuesday, a single turbine near Martha’s Vineyard provided five megawatts of renewable energy to the New England grid, developers said. The wind turbine is one of 62 wind turbines planned for Vineyard Wind 1, an offshore site owned by applications company Avangrid and wind energy investor Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners (CIP). The companies were looking to deliver offshore wind through the site before the end of 2023; They lost that purpose for only a few days.
Still, Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey called it a “historic moment.” Healey said in a statement that the farm will soon crank out “power equivalent of over 400,000 Massachusetts households.” Avangrid and CIP say the site will feature five turbines by “early” this year, to power up homes — and presumably some electric-vehicle batteries — in the otherwise natural gas-reliant state.
The news from Vineyard Wind comes about a month after another offshore wind company near Montauk Point, New York, reported a similar development. The offshore wind allocation, dubbed South Fork Wind, has so far two turbines installed, one of which is operational. The owners, Danish energy company Ørsted and app company Eversource, announce that they will install 10 more turbines in early 2024.
Still, U. S. offshore wind has taken some serious hits recently, despite the Biden administration, which has made offshore wind a key component of its strategy to reduce climate pollution.
In October, Ørsted canceled two wind allocations in New Jersey due to supply chain delays and high interest rates. Around the same time, Avangrid paid $16 million to cancel a forced sale agreement in Connecticut, even though the assignment itself was not canceled. And on Wednesday, fossil fuel giants BP and Equinor canceled their “Empire Wind 2” contract with New York, also due to interest rates and supply chain issues. Bottom line: Commercial-scale offshore wind allocations take a long time to get up and running. Projects planned before the pandemic seems much less feasible now than before, in terms of prices and tariffs.
Several startups aim to drive down the price of wind energy. SkySpecs, for example, uses drones and AI to monitor wind turbines, predict equipment failures and ultimately reduce turbine downtime. The Goldman Sachs-backed startup has secured $118 million to date, including an $80 million Series D in 2022.
Aerones is another startup created around wind energy. The company makes cleaning robots and turbine blades, to keep turbines running longer and mitigate contaminants from oil leaks. With the backing of Y Combinator, Aerones announced Wednesday that it has secured a grant of approximately $4. 8. million from the European Union Innovation Fund.
There’s also AirLoom, subsidized through Breakthrough Energy, which aims to reduce the load on wind power in part by adopting a non-traditional design; In my opinion, it looks more like a cool art installation than a wind farm.