By — Ivette Feliciano Ivette Feliciano By — Sam Weber Sam Weber Leave a comment 0comments Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/green-light-for-massive-east-coast-offshore-wind-project Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Transcript Audio This week, federal regulators made it official: Vineyard Wind will be the first large-scale offshore wind energy project in the United States. As NewsHour Weekend reported in late March, this nearly $3 billion project off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, will generate enough electricity for about 400,000 homes. Ivette Feliciano has the story. Read the Full Transcript Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors. Hari Sreenivasan: Finally tonight, we wanted to provide a quick update on a story that we first brought you earlier this spring. It's on the fate of a proposed offshore wind energy project off the coast of Massachusetts. NewsHour Weekend's Ivette Feliciano has more. Ivette Feliciano: This week, federal regulators made it official: Vineyard Wind will be the first large-scale offshore wind energy project in the United States. As we reported in late March, this nearly $3 billion project off the coast of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket, will generate enough electricity for about 400,000 homes. The CEO of Vineyard Wind, Lars Pedersen, says this new project will kickstart the industry. Lars Pedersen: This is not about a single project this is about an industry, an industry that is going to revitalize waterfronts up and down the Eastern seaboard, create well-paying jobs, and deliver clean affordable energy to households while the states are transitioning from fossil and nuclear power plants to a green future. Ivette Feliciano: The United States currently has only two small projects – 7 turbines in total – in operation. Vineyard will be the first to use a new turbine made by GE that stands more than 850 feet tall, with each of its three blades stretching more than the length of a football field. Lars Pedersen: Every time the blade spins twice, you can power a home for a day. So it's really impressive hardware. So we have been able to shrink the footprint of the project from 108 positions down to 62 while still producing the power we have promised to Massachusetts. Ivette Feliciano: With the approval earlier this week, Pedersen says the project is on track to start construction later this year, and start producing power for the grid by 2023. Listen to this Segment Watch Watch the Full Episode PBS NewsHour from May 15, 2021 By — Ivette Feliciano Ivette Feliciano Ivette Feliciano shoots, produces and reports on camera for PBS NewsHour Weekend. Before starting with NewsHour in 2013, she worked as a one-person-band correspondent for the News 12 Networks, where she won a New York Press Club Award for her coverage of Super Storm Sandy, which ravaged the East Coast in 2012. Prior to that, Ivette was the Associate Producer of Latin American news for Worldfocus, a nationally televised, daily international news show seen on Public Television. While at Worldfocus, Ivette served as the show’s Field Producer and Reporter for Latin America, covering special reports on the Mexican drug war as well as a 5-part series out of Bolivia, which included an interview with President Evo Morales. In 2010, she co-produced a documentary series on New York’s baseball history that aired on Channel Thirteen. Ivette holds a Master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where she specialized in broadcast journalism. @IvetteF_News By — Sam Weber Sam Weber Sam Weber has covered everything from living on minimum wage to consumer finance as a shooter/producer for PBS NewsHour Weekend. Prior joining NH Weekend, he previously worked for Need to Know on PBS and in public radio. He’s an avid cyclist and Chicago Bulls fan. @samkweber