Offshore wind industry to spread throughout region, industry leaders say

PROVIDENCE – No single state will capture the entire industry emerging to support offshore wind farms, industry leaders said at a conference Monday.
The leaders appeared at a morning panel of the Northeast Offshore Wind Summit organized by the R.I. Economic Development Corporation.
Panelist Jim Lanard, the president of the Offshore Development Coalition, said no one state in the Northeast is big enough for the industry to take root only there.
“It’s not going to be one state owning everything,” he told the audience at the Providence Biltmore Hotel.
Instead, Lanard expected the industry to grow across the region, concentrating near coastal ports and the sites of farms.
And for the industry to really take off, the region must act as a whole, said Dennis Duffy, the vice president of regulatory affairs for Energy Management Inc., the company behind the Cape Wind project. The federal government also needs to step in with a streamlined regulatory system governing proposed wind farms in federal waters, he said.
“In a lot of ways there’s an economic development scramble going on,” he said. “I just think it’s very important we move together.”
Uniting under one clear and consistent voice will help attract investors to these projects that can stretch more than a billion dollars apiece, Duffy said.
In Rhode Island, Deepwater Wind is proposing a roughly $200 million, eight-turbine wind farm off the coast of Block Island. The Providence-based company also wants to build a larger farm in federal waters at a cost of more than $1 billion.
The Block Island project remains marred in a court case but Chief Development Officer Paul Rich told the audience he was confident the company would prevail.