Getting information about the state’s only offshore wind project under construction has been difficult in the last six months. CAI and the Martha’s Vineyard Times teamed up last week to visit Vineyard Wind by boat, to see what visual evidence we could find of the project status.
We’re motoring out to Vineyard Wind on a hired boat, a private cabin cruiser.
At the horizon, the field of turbines gradually comes into clearer view.
We hope to answer some of the questions that Vineyard Wind has refused for months: How many turbines are running? And how many of those are actually sending power to the New England grid?
We approach from the north. At first, only a single turbine seems to be spinning.
But some may not yet be visible, due either to distance or the way the turbines are arranged in rows, one behind the other.
We’ll see more in a moment, as we get closer.
Staff at the project have made very few public comments since the beginning of the year, after the initial response to last summer’s shattered turbine blade.
The other big change since then is the new president. On his first day in office, President Trump halted wind farm permitting.
The order did not affect Vineyard Wind directly, but the president’s opposition may be a factor in the company’s lack of communication.
Nantucket Select Board member Brooke Mohr said as much Tuesday, when the town held a press conference calling out Vineyard Wind’s behavior.
“Since the immediate aftermath of the blade failure, and since the last presidential election, Vineyard Wind’s leadership has essentially gone into hiding,” she said. “We believe that they are concerned about the change in policy at the federal level and drawing scrutiny from the new administration.”
For its part, Vineyard Wind said that since Nantucket and blade manufacturer GE Vernova have reached a settlement over the broken blade, Vineyard Wind plans to resume “traditional” communication with the town. The settlement was announced July 11.
Now, back to the number of turbines actually running.
One of Vineyard Wind’s parent companies, Iberdrola, said in an investor report July 23 — the same day CAI and the Martha’s Vineyard Times visited the wind farm — that 17 turbines were sending power to the grid and 23 were fully installed.
“In the U.S., more than one-third of Vineyard Wind 1 turbines are already installed, with more than 25 percent of them already exporting energy,” said Iberdrola Executive Chairman Ignacio Sánchez Galán in a presentation about the report.
Iberdrola controls Avangrid, one of the companies developing Vineyard Wind 1 in a joint venture with Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, a renewable energy investment company based in Denmark. Iberdrola, based in Spain, is worth more than $117 billion.
The New Bedford Light reported that Vineyard Wind confirmed the Iberdrola figures.
But the claim appears different from what CAI and the Martha’s Vineyard Times were able to observe firsthand, 15 miles south of the Vineyard.
While wind turbines don’t always spin 24 hours a day — they get stopped for maintenance, and during startup testing, for example — we initially saw only a single turbine running, and then a handful.
As the boat got closer, turbines that had been motionless began to rotate.
The one nearest to us suddenly powered up. We could hear a light sound that grew deeper as the blades gained speed.
Getting every turbine in your field of view is difficult, but in two hours, from about 10 a.m. to noon, we never saw more than nine running at once — about half the 17 claimed.
Vineyard Wind refused to answer any questions about the reasons for the discrepancy.
As recently as May, Gov. Maura Healey’s administration said only four turbines were sending power to the grid, as reported by State House News Service and independently confirmed by CAI.
Sixty-two turbines are planned for Vineyard Wind 1 in all.
We saw about 40 that looked complete from the exterior — meaning they had a tower, nacelle, and three blades. That’s more than the 23 fully installed turbines indicated in the corporate report.
Some that appear complete may need additional work or replacement blades, if their original blades came from the same manufacturing plant as the defective one that broke.
Meanwhile, installation appears to be continuing. An installation vessel was stationed alongside one of the turbines, with two blades in place, one of which was still held by a crane.
We saw no movement of the crane or workers on the vessel deck.
ISO New England, the nonprofit corporation that operates the New England grid, says it does not reveal how much power a facility is generating.
A spokesperson, Mary Cate Colapietro, said companies could use that information to predict the actions of competitors, and then bid in a way that could manipulate market prices.
This story was originally published by CAI. It was shared as part of the New England News Collaborative.
