By TIM FAULKNER/ecoRI News
staff
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| VIPs recently toured the interior of a bottom section of one of the towers for the Block Island Wind Farm, at a staging area on the Providence waterfront. (Tim Faulkner/ecoRI News) |
PROVIDENCE — While offshore
construction is idle, onshore assembly of the Block Island Wind Farm is moving
along.
Not far from the Narragansett Bay
Commission's three spinning, land-based wind turbines and port facilities that
ship coal, propane and oil, Deepwater Wind and General Electric held a recent
press conference to celebrate the midpoint of construction for the nation’s
first offshore wind farm.
“This is the year we are going to
finish,” Deepwater
Wind CEO Jeffrey
Grybowsky said during the March 18 event at ProvPort Inc.
Five bottom sections for the
ocean-based wind towers stood like rockets waiting to launch as politicians and
business and labor leaders praised the renewable-energy project.
The 95-foot-tall steel tubes, however, won’t be firing into the cosmos, but will instead be shipped vertically down Narragansett Bay this summer to commence the next phase of the $300 million project.
The 95-foot-tall steel tubes, however, won’t be firing into the cosmos, but will instead be shipped vertically down Narragansett Bay this summer to commence the next phase of the $300 million project.
Watch this video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztbuFlzXihU
Despite struggles last fall with safety reports and damage to the foundations caused by rough seas, the five-turbine wind farm is on schedule to be operational by the end of the year.
Although painting and a few punch-list tasks were unfinished
before winter, the first phase of construction was generally finished, with the
completion of pile driving and the installation of the “jacket” foundations for
each turbine.
On the city's industrial
waterfront, the bottom of three sections for each tower are being fitted with
electronics and other hardware before they are floated 3 miles southeast of
Block Island.
Two more sections will arrive at the Providence site before the
270-foot-tall towers are assembled. Once the blades are attached, each turbine
will stand 560 feet tall.
By comparison, the wind turbines at the Narragansett
Bay Commission are 364 feet tall.
Submarine cable installation is
scheduled to begin this spring. The transmission cable will be buried 4-8 feet
below the sea floor. A 7.2-mile line will connect the wind farm to the Block
Island Power Co. A 25.1-mile cable will run from Block Island to Narragansett.
Gov. Gina Raimondo lauded the
Providence portion of the project for producing 160 high-paying jobs. According
to an iron workers union representative, the hourly pay plus benefits equates
to $58 an hour.
Although the Providence operation
is a temporary facility, Raimondo said the project is establishing Rhode Island
as a building hub for wind projects.
“Wind energy is the only
indigenous form of energy we have. It’s clean, it’s economically competitive
and Rhode Island is going to lead the way,” she said.
The event was hosted in a
short-term warehouse built and operated by GE. Last year, GE acquired the
energy assets of France-based Alstom for $10 billion. Five GE turbines will be
installed at the Block Island project. Each turbine has the capacity to
generate 6 megawatts of electricity, or about 90 percent of the energy used on
Block Island.
The 105-acre site at ProvPort also includes New England Petroleum, a
diesel fuel and home heating oil distributor; Univar, an industrial chemical
distributor; scrap metals processor Schnitzer Northeast; and Enterprise
Products & Terminals, a propane shipping terminal and distributor.
The ProvPort site is one of four
onshore project locations in Rhode Island. The others are Port of Galilee in
Narragansett, Quonset Business Park in North Kingstown, and Block Island.