Cape Wind Associates, the company seeking regulatory approval to build a $700-million wind-turbine farm in Nantucket Sound, is in discussions with the state of Rhode Island to locate its main construction facilities at Quonset Davisville Port and Commerce Park.
Cape Wind officials told the Providence Business News last week that they have visited Quonset on several occasions and are engaged in “ongoing discussions” with the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation.
Gov. Don Carcieri has targeted the Cape Wind project as a potential boost for his economic-development agenda. In a one-page letter to a White House energy task force last month, Carcieri called the plan “an extremely promising project,” citing potential economic and environmental benefits.
Cape Wind representatives have met several times with EDC Executive Director Michael McMahon to discuss Quonset as a potential site, according to Cape Wind President Jim Gordon. Included in the meetings were officials from GE Wind Energy, the company expected to construct the 420-foot-tall turbines for the project.
GE Wind is eyeing Quonset “as a potential staging area not only for construction (of wind-turbine generators) but also for assembly of components and some manufacturing,” Gordon said. The company also is considering the Fore River Shipyard in Quincy, Mass., and “a few spots in Fall River,” Gordon said. He added that some combination of sites is a possibility.
Offshore wind farm
Boston-based Cape Wind unveiled plans two years ago to build 170 wind turbines five miles off the Nantucket shore in Horseshoe Shoal, which would be the first offshore wind farm built in the United States.
If the project moves forward, the construction phase would generate between 600 and 1,000 jobs over the course of more than two years, according to an economic-impact study issued last month by Global Insight Inc. of Lexington, Mass., a research firm hired by Cape Wind.
The plan is a long way from fruition, however. It is under review by 17 different state and federal environmental agencies – itself a process that could last a year or more – and faces a raft of opposition from Nantucket residents.
In Carcieri’s letter to the White House, he urges the Bush administration to “streamline” the permitting reviews of the project, and heralds its economic potential.
“This project would foster new technologies and reinvigorate construction and marine-trade activity in port facilities throughout the region,” the April 11 letter reads. It also says the project would help eliminate greenhouse gases and reduce the nation’s dependence on foreign oil.
The governor’s support for the Cape Wind project is part of a broader strategy to establish a foothold for Quonset as the primary manufacturing center for windmill projects on the East Coast, and comes at a time when wind-energy proposals are popping up with growing frequency.
A proposed 120-megawatt wind farm off Long Island, for example, recently won the backing of New York Gov. George Pataki.
“We want to establish Quonset as the home base for Eastern seaboard wind power,” McMahon said in a phone interview last week. He said he has met with representatives of the Cape Wind project several times and he thinks Rhode Island has a good shot at wooing developers to Quonset.
McMahon said the 3,000-acre port has a geographic advantage over Quincy, which is seen as the primary competitor. He said the massive turbine blades would be too large to fit through the Cape Cod Canal, which would be the logical route from Quincy to the Horseshoe Shoal site. Instead, they would have to be shipped around the Cape.
“That’s a route you don’t want to take if you can avoid it,” McMahon said. “Quonset is a much straighter shot.”
A decision on the construction and assembly locations is not expected until the company receives the regulatory go-ahead.
TPI Composites Inc., a Warren company that makes turbine blades, hopes to land a contract with GE Wind to manufacture the 50-meter blades required for the Cape Wind project, according to Michael Zavell, TPI’s director of market development.
Cleaner, renewable
Many of the wind-farm proposals now being proposed in Eastern states – including the Cape Wind plan – stem from recent state laws requiring that small percentages of power supplied by energy companies come from cleaner, renewable sources.
Green-energy proponents in Rhode Island have said they hope Carcieri’s backing of the Cape Wind project will translate to support for renewable-energy legislation now being considered at the State House.
A bill before the House Environment and Natural Resource Committee would mandate that at least 20 percent of the electricity from utilities and other suppliers in Rhode Island is generated by renewable sources, such as wind, solar or small-scale hydroelectric power, by the year 2020.
Massachusetts enacted a similar standard in 1998, and Cape Wind officials have said the law is the primary driver behind its plan for Nantucket Sound. Approval of the Rhode Island House bill could set the stage for more renewable-energy projects in southern New England, clean-energy supporters have said.
“Whether the Cape Wind project goes forward or not, it’s an example of what we could see more of if a renewable portfolio standard gets passed,” said Erich Stephens of People’s Power and Light, a nonprofit energy cooperative.
Carcieri has studied the legislation but has not taken a position on the measure, according to Jeff Neal, Carcieri’s press secretary.
Kate Strouse Canada of the Rhode Island Public Interest Research Group (RIPIRG) said the legislation offers a rare chance to couple an environmental initiative with job growth and economic development.
“What we’d like to see the governor do is come out in support of renewable energy as a whole, for all the same reasons he is supporting Cape Wind,” she said.
The current legislation, introduced by Rep. Paul Moura, a Providence Democrat, failed to pass last year. But Stephens of People’s Power and Light said the legislation has a better shot this year because it is more clearly defined.
A committee assembled in 2001 by the state Department of Environmental Management to formulate a “Greenhouse Gas Action Plan” recently concluded that development of renewable-energy sources is the No. 1 way to cut back on harmful carbon-dioxide emissions.
Carcieri’s public backing of the controversial Cape Wind proposal has drawn criticism from at least one corner.
A spokeswoman for Massachusetts Attorney General Tom Reilly, who has called for a ban on all off-shore energy projects until the federal government imposes regulations for them, posed this question in a Boston Herald story last month:
“Would (Carcieri) feel the same way if the project was proposed off the coast of Newport?”
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