Name: The Nation’s First Big Offshore Wind Farm is Coming
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Offshore wind has been slow to take off in the US, compared to Europe. So, why now? What will the impacts be?

The first commercial-scale offshore wind farm in the U.S. is being built off the coast of Massachusetts.

Offshore wind has been slow to take off in the US, compared to Europe. So, why now? What will the impacts be?

The first commercial-scale offshore wind farm in the US is being built off Massachusetts.

The nation’s first big offshore wind farm is coming

nation’s first big offshore wind farm is coming

The first commercial-scale offshore wind farm in the U.S. is being built off the coast of Massachusetts.

The Nation’s First Big Offshore Wind Farm is Coming

Tech & Engineering

Narrator: This giant tube is part of the first big offshore wind farm in the U.S., now under construction off the coast of Massachusetts. The company behind the project Vineyard Wind, says a single spin of one of the turbines could power a home for a day. And 62 of these, each more than twice as tall as the Statue of Liberty, are being installed about 34 miles from this beach when complete Vineyard Wind says the project will be barely visible from nearby islands and will power over 400,000 homes and businesses. But there are now a number of offshore wind projects in development. In fact, by 2030, the U.S. aims for offshore wind to generate 30 gigawatts of energy enough to power about 10 million homes. Still, offshore wind has been slow to spin up in the U.S. compared to Europe, where there are thousands of wind turbines. So why offshore wind? What kind of impact will it have? And why now? Rachel Pachter: A lot has evolved. It's taken a lot of time to develop the regulatory situation, to get various stakeholders comfortable. The economic environment.Narrator: The prospects for abundant, clean energy from wind becomes pretty obvious when you look at a map of where the wind blows the most. That's the dark blue. There's a lot of it in the center of the country where many onshore wind farms have sprung up. But most of the population lives closer to the coasts. And it's hard to transmit energy that far.Rachel Pachter: It's extremely challenging to build long transmission lines when it comes to getting permitting rights across multiple states.Narrator: But just offshore, there's a whole lot more dark blue. And that wind is close to the large population centers in the U.S.. The trick is getting it to shoreRachel Pachter: To build out a grid that can take the power from this location to where the load centers are, that is a huge part of ensuring that this industry is successful.Narrator: So how do they do it? For vineyard, wind cables carrying the electricity are buried under the seafloor and come ashore under this beach from here.They continue underground over four miles to this place. Well, that's kind of cool looking. A substation that converts the electricity to a voltage that then feeds into the electrical grid. Every big wind project will have to make landfall somewhere that requires construction and a substation, both of which can be disrupted. And the effects of construction extend offshore to like on the fishing industry and marine animals. These are some of the reasons why offshore wind has faced a lot of opposition in the U.S. during construction.Hauke L. Kite-Powell: That will probably be the time when there are the most significant impacts, for example, on commercial fishing. So even if you could fish there, they probably wouldn't be many fish to catch.Narrator: That's because noise can be disruptive to marine animals, and driving a pile for a wind turbine is pretty loud. Hauke L. Kite-Powell: Sound travels exceptionally well underwater because sound is conducted very well by seawater. But the travel path of that sound is disrupted when the sound wave hits an air pocket in the water because air is not as good a conductor of sound as water is.Narrator: One solution that vineyard wind is using is as simple as it is clever. Create a curtain of bubbles. Yeah. Bubbles.Hauke L. Kite-Powell: The idea of the bubble curtains is to put hoses on the seabed around the turbine tower and force pressurized air out of small holes in those hoses. The idea is that that air bubble curtain will impede the transmission of the sound. It won't stop it, but it will make the signal much less loud. Narrator: Once construction is over, the fishes and fishing should return. Hauke L. Kite-Powell: There may be some changes in the distribution of species as a result of the presence of the wind farm. For example, the additional structure that's now in the water there may attract certain species of fish that wouldn't have been there in that abundance previously. Narrator: Wind developers will need to take a number of precautions to protect the marine environment, but nothing can fully protect it from all harm. And global warming itself could cause far more damage than wind farms to the ocean ecosystems.My personal view is that the change is worth pursuing in the interest of slowing the negative effects on our ocean ecosystem that global warming and climate change is having right now. It's not free. It comes at a cost. And that's a tradeoff that we have to consider when we decide to put wind farms into the ocean. Narrator: Some think that we should be focusing more on developing different carbon free energy technologies like solar and nuclear. They, too, come with tradeoffs. It's still early days for the U.S. offshore wind industry and there are a lot of complexities to navigate from the marine environment to the fishing and shipping industries to residents.Hauke L. Kite-Powell: We really are in a situation where we have to decide what changes and sacrifices in some instances we are prepared to make to ensure that our grandchildren have a workable and livable planet.

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The nation’s first big offshore wind farm is coming

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Support Provided By

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Vertical Turbines May Harvest More Wind Power

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