A long time coming as New Bedford Marine Commerce Terminal inks lease as the primary staging area for Vineyard Wind offshore wind far project.

It was a long time coming, but Massachusetts’ New Bedford Marine Commerce Terminal is finally getting business…and a lot of respect.

The Vineyard Wind project, America’s first large-scale offshore wind development, will lease the New Bedford terminal for at least 18 months as its primary staging facility, at an annual cost of $6 million. While the exact timetable for the project is still uncertain, the lease will stretch from December 2020 into 2022, and quite possibly beyond.

“At least for the first couple years, it’s going to be pretty much at capacity,” said Richard Baldwin, principal consultant at Ramboll, a consultancy that specializes in offshore wind development.

Vineyard Wind is an 800MW wind farm that will be constructed 14 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard.

The 29-acre heavy lift facility at New Bedford was specifically built to stage the offshore wind industry. It’s the first in the US to do so and is far ahead of others now being planned.

“We feel that we’re well positioned to not only support offshore wind development in these first few years of the US offshore wind industry, but also looking forward to the future,” said Gregory Dolan, the terminal manager.

Long Time Blowing in the Wind

The saga of the terminal is one of persistence, setbacks and, ultimately, some success. Construction began in 2013 on the site of a long-abandoned fabric mill. The vacant site lay south of the New Bedford Port, the largest fishing port in the US.

The project’s centerpiece is a 1,200-foot-long pier, with uniform load-bearing capacities of 20 metric tons per square meter and concentrated loads of up to 100 metric tons per square meter. This is critical as turbines and blades are becoming larger and heavier.

“The terminal is designed for at least the next generation of turbines to come,” said Dolan, who was also involved in the planning and design of the terminal. “Even in comparison to the European ports, it’s definitely at the higher end” when it comes to load bearing.

The terminal ended up costing $113 million. But 60% of that money was spent on environmental cleanup and remediation. The port of New Bedford is a federal superfund site and construction included removal of PCVs and other contaminants from the harbor, as part of channel improvements, as well as removal of contaminants on the site itself.

The terminal is part of the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, a state economic development agency.

The New Bedford Terminal was aimed to at first support the Cape Wind project, the ultimately doomed almost-two-decades-long effort to construct wind farms in Nantucket Sound, off Cape Cod. Wealthy residents litigated the project to death, while Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy battled against it in Washington. Cape Wind ultimately sank in court in 2017.

Meanwhile, the terminal, completed in early 2015, has stood pretty much empty, although it recently hosted delivery of onshore wind turbines destined for western Massachusetts. It’s also being used by survey vessels for other offshore projects.

According to Bruce Carlisle, senior director for offshore wind at the Clean Energy Center, state officials had been working with the federal Ocean Energy Management about wind projects further offshore since 2009.

Offshore Wind Revolution

While Rhode Island’s Block Island wind farm became the first commercial offshore wind in the US to be built and operate, that 30MW project is extremely small and contained. Massachusetts can claim bragging rights when it comes to major offshore wind, while Rhode Island may be close behind with its 400MW Revolution Wind project, approved by state regulators in May. This will be a joint venture with Connecticut.

Carlisle believes most of the staging for Revolution Wind will take place in Rhode Island or Connecticut, but New Bedford might handle some of the overflow. “We haven’t ruled out the ability of the terminal to provide some overflow or some additional component or logistic support, or other poor areas of the port in New Bedford, for example, to serve as an operation and maintenance base,” he said.

The New Bedford terminal was designed with some flexibility in mind. The length of the quayside will allow simultaneous delivery and pickup, crucial for an offshore wind farm staging, where hugely expensive jackup vessels can ill afford to sit idle. Add to this the further complexity of the Jones Act, which mandates US flagged ships deliver goods within the US.

“The terminal is built to sort of maximize the logistical flexibility of a developer,” explained Dolan. “We wanted to be able to have a deployment going on while delivery of components was still ongoing. So the quayside was built so that you could have an internationally flagged cargo vessel unloading it at one end while you were loading U.S. flagged standard at all the other.”

So saying, New Bedford is, by comparison to the mega-ports of Europe, quite small. It’s not designed to accommodate onsite construction or large-scale fabrication, which is what has developed in European purpose-built offshore wind ports. “We don’t have some of the same manufacturing opportunities that you see” elsewhere, said Edward Anthes-Washburn, executive director at the New Bedford Port Authority. “There are some things that we’re not ever going to do because, we have a pretty productive commercial fishing port and seafood processing sector that is very vibrant. We have to be somewhat choosy on what to do.”

New Bedford also will be hard-pressed to handle more than one project at a time, said Baldwin, adding, “While it is downstream of any bridges and there are no air-gap issues, vessels do have to transit the hurricane barrier so there is a vessel beam issue.”

However, because the Commonwealth of Massachusetts paid for the facility’s development, wind farm developers won’t have the burden of carrying costs on the port. They’ll just have to pay rent. “This is their preferred model,” said Baldwin.

“There were some tense moments with the failure of Cape Wind,” said Carlisle. “But that said, we had taken the long view on this. Cape Wind was a driver, but [the terminal] wasn’t built for Cape Wind.”