There’s a big promise in offshore wind power in the U.S. But it isn’t going to happen without a lot of logistics coordinating a brand-new supply chain.
After years of false starts, America’s offshore wind power industry is revving up. Developers are unveiling projects up and down the eastern seaboard, as state governments clamor to structure power sharing agreements that would provide the financial foundation for the industry.
“They’re establishing a pipeline of offshore wind projects basically from now through at least 2035,” said Richard Baldwin, principal consultant for Ramboll, the engineering, design and consultancy company.
Onshore infrastructure to support these wind farms is critical. Specialized supply chains must be structured, and soon.
“It’s critically important that infrastructure gets developed alongside market creation,” said Liz Burdock, the CEO and president of the Business Network for Offshore Wind, a Washington-based nonprofit dedicated to advancing the industry.
Added Baldwin: “It’s going to be logistics, logistics, logistics.”
These supply chains are centered on specially designed, purpose-built ports, or dedicated terminals within larger port boundaries. Because of the immense size of offshore wind components and the complexities of wind farm construction, utilizing current port facilities and sharing them with other maritime commerce will be difficult, if not impossible. Even after the wind farms are constructed, facilities will be needed for ongoing monitoring and repair.
Specialized Port Boom
Indeed, specialized ports can become the focal point of this fast-growing industry. They can provide not just the staging of the wind farms, but host everything from maintenance and warehousing, to testing and training. A few will encompass manufacturing facilities as well.
Bruce Carlisle, senior director for offshore wind at the state development agency, the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, breaks down this infrastructure in three ways:
- The staging, marshaling and deployment, where components of the wind turbine are brought into the port, prepped and then loaded on either installation vessels or barges to transport them to the offshore site.
- Ongoing operations and maintenance, which can include everything from hosting crew transfer vessels to spare parts.
- Component manufacturing onsite, which provides easier and more economical access to the wind farms themselves. These dockside facilities will become more and more necessary as the turbines grow in size and weight and the offshore wind industry in the US grows. (The latest generation offshore wind turbines churn out 8MW or 10MW each. However, a new generation is fast approaching. GE is now erecting a prototype 12MW turbine in the port of Rotterdam, which will tower more than 850 feet high, with each blade weighing 35 tons. Fifteen MW and even 20MW turbines are now in the planning stages.)
“There’s going to be very significant both direct and indirect induced supply chain and economic benefits and workforce opportunities from these projects,” said Carlisle.
The industry talks about the levelized cost of energy (LCOE). This takes into account everything from wind speed to cost of components. So, most obviously, a more powerful turbine costs more, but its added production more than offsets that initial outlay. Fewer turbines are necessary to produce the anticipated power.
Infrastructure is definitely part of the LCOE equation. A state-of-the-art, efficient port facility can translate into an overall 5% savings on the cost of offshore wind, according to estimates by Wind Europe, the Brussels-based wind industry policy group.
Port Development Risks
Development of this infrastructure provides new opportunities for existing port authorities. But there are risks as well.
No one expects one mammoth offshore wind hub to develop as it has in some European countries. Instead, those in the industry talk of the formation of a distributed network of ports. Some of these will provide services to nearby projects, others will supply one particular component.
“It’s going to require very sophisticated logistics,” said Burdock. “You’re going to get your blades from one port, nacelles from another, foundations from another. It will all have to come together in a coordinating fashion.”
But she stressed that might be a decade in the making. In the initial stages, Europe-based suppliers will manufacture and ship over the gigantic blades, mammoth turbines and monopiles.
There are signs some onshore manufacturing could come to the US in the near future. In June, Ørsted A/S, the giant European wind developer announced that it had won the bid for a 1.1GW offshore wind farm in the waters off Southern New Jersey. As part of that award, according to Green Tech, Ørsted said it would assist the German manufacturer EEW with a factory to build the monopile steel foundations. The factory will be located in the Paulsboro Marine Terminal, the recently opened port on the Delaware River.
New Bedford, MA is America’s only purpose-built port for offshore wind. Its saga shows both risks and rewards. (See page 8).
“There›s risk in being the first mover in anything. There’s political risk. There’s financial risk,” said Edward Anthes-Washburn,” executive director at the New Bedford Port Authority. He credits state leaders with sticking with the project for years before fruition and for the facility picking and choosing what it does and what it leaves for others. “We don’t try to boil the ocean as it were. We focus on the pieces of the supply chain that we think reflect who we are as a port.”
Finding the Space
European megaports such as Esbjerg in Denmark and Bremerhaven in Germany have allocated massive amounts of space to offshore wind staging and support facilities. Britain’s Green Port Hull alone offers more than 1,200 acres to the industry, centered on Siemens’ offshore wind turbine manufacturing plant.
Contrast that with the New Bedford Terminal, which is shoehorned into a 29-acre site.
“On the East Coast, we don’t have that many open pieces of land that are available,” said Baldwin.
Proposed offshore-related facilities won’t be limited to existing ports or even land nearby. In Massachusetts, for example, private developers are strengthening and repurposing the site of the former Brayton Point coal-fired power plant to enable it to support offshore wind component manufacturing, staging and maintenance. In Maryland, the Sparrows Point logistics center, the shuttered site of Bethlehem Steel, is being developed as an offshore wind staging facility by a partnership that includes wind developer Ørsted.
States are structuring a variety of economic incentives and support to lure offshore wind developers and equipment manufacturers. There’s some concern state economic development authorities may compete against each other for facilities, one that Burdock, for one, dismisses.
“I’ve heard many European suppliers say that ‘we can’t have every state wanting the whole supply chain,’” said Burdock. “That’s just not going to happen.”
She cited the Paulsboro project. “It’s going to probably be the only steel fabrication plant that we have on the East Coast for some time,” she said. “We’re not going to see another one pop up in Massachusetts and another one pop up in Virginia and one pop up in Maryland. It’s just not possible.”
States enthusiasm, in fact, is a plus as the industry needs to develop in a coordinated manner, with the infrastructure in line with construction and development timetables. “I wouldn’t be concerned about a bottleneck because the states are really cooperative partners with the industry,” Burdock said.
An offshore wind farm may take two years to construct, but timing is everything. Vessels bringing components to the US from Europe don’t want to compete with massive tankers vying for space. They must be coordinated as well with those that ferry the equipment offshore to the special-built vessels that do the actual construction. “They don’t want any downtime,” Baldwin explained. “These vessels cost two or three hundred thousand dollars a day. They don’t want to be down for a couple hours because, [another vessel] isn’t bringing the right component out at the right time.”
And the Jones Act will complicate this process further as only US flagged ships can carry the components from American ports to the sites in US waters (see Buxbaum article page 3).
No doubt the challenges to bringing large scale offshore wind power to the East Coast will require a significant investment in time and money in infrastructure development. But the promise of the sea wind pushing clean mega-watts of electricity through the grid of the most densely populated region of the U.S. makes the endeavor worth the risk.
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