Empowering the logistics for offshore wind power

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.