NEW BEDFORD – New Bedford hopes to be the staging port for Cape Wind’s 130 wind turbines, Mayor Scott W. Lang told Providence Business News on Tuesday.
As a staging port, the wind turbine and wind turbine foundation components would be delivered to the port facility where they are temporarily stored and, eventually, assembled. Later, they are loaded back onto barges by cranes, said Mark Rodgers, communications director of Cape Wind.
The Cape Wind project is an offshore wind farm on Horseshoe Shoal in Nantucket Sound, developed by Massachusetts-based Energy Management Inc. The turbines will produce up to 420 megawatts of renewable energy and will provide three quarters of the Cape and Islands’ electricity needs when there are average winds, the Cape Wind website explains.
New Bedford and Quonset Point, Rhode Island are being considered as the two locations for Cape Wind’s staging port.
“We’ve been involved in discussing and pursuing this project for the better part of two years and I think that New Bedford has a tremendous amount of attributes, including a deep harbor resource as well as a very ready and skilled employment pool,” said Lang.
“We’d like to see manufacturing and assembly jobs come back to the area and we have a lot of people that would be enthusiastic to go to work in the alternative energy field,” said Lang, noting that New Bedford has a working waterfront with “all the ingredients” to be a staging port.
Cape Wind hopes to make a final decision by the end of the year, said Rodgers.
