First Vineyard Wind turbine heads out to sea – Nantucket Current

Reprinted courtesy and permission of The Nantucket Current (https://nantucketcurrent.com)

by Jason Graziadei • Sep 07, 2023

A tugboat carrying Vineyard Wind’s first assembled turbine squeezed through the New Bedford hurricane barrier opening on Wednesday. Photo courtesy of Vineyard Wind

In a milestone for Vineyard Wind, the first assembled turbine components left the port of New Bedford on Wednesday, squeezing through the city’s hurricane barrier behind a tugboat, and heading out to sea.

“While we’ve had many firsts, once this turbine is installed, it will stand as a proud symbol of America’s energy transition,” Vineyard Wind CEO Klaus Moeller said in a statement. “It may look easy, but the safe transportation of these components miles over the open water is no small feat.”

Vineyard Wind is on pace to become the country’s first large-scale offshore wind farm. The project, which will include 62 turbines spaced one nautical mile apart, is slated for federal waters approximately 15 miles southwest of Nantucket.

Over the course of 2023, the company has been conducting geotechnical surveys and laying cable for the project, and recently completed a substation and installed some of the monopiles the turbins will be fixed to. The company, which is backed by Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners (CIP) and Avangrid Renewables, LLC, believes it will generate 800 megawatts of electricity annually and power over 400,000 homes.

The turbine components left the New Bedford Marine Commerce Terminal with three vertically placed tower sections reaching more than 200 feet in height, three 321-foot-long blades, and a “nacelle pod” that houses the generating components. Foss Maritime, a US service contractor, will deliver loads weighing more than 1,700 tons each to the DEME Group’s Sea Installer vessel with 300-foot-deep legs to the area where the turbines will be installed, approximately 15 miles southwest of Nantucket.

When complete, the GE Haliade-X turbines that will be attached to the monopiles will reach 837 feet in the air, each nearly as tall as the Eiffel Tower.

About the Nantucket Current

Welcome to Nantucket Current, the premier online news source for Nantucket Island. Our mission is simple: to provide our readers with the latest news, stories, and information about the island in an unbiased and unfiltered manner. As a publication of N Magazine, Nantucket Current was founded in April 2021 with the goal of delivering timely news coverage of important topics, while also highlighting the best of our community and shedding light on difficult issues.

Thank you to Jason Graziadei, editor in chief for permission to reprint this article.

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