America’s First Offshore Wind Farm May Power Up a New Industry - by The New York Times' Justin Gillis

A just-completed project off the coast of Rhode Island, though relatively tiny, is at the forefront of a sea-based transition to renewable energy.

By global standards, the Block Island Wind Farm is a tiny project, just five turbines capable of powering about 17,000 homes.  Yet many people are hoping its completion, with the final blade bolted into place at the end of last week, will mark the start of a new American industry, one that could eventually make a huge contribution to reducing the nation’s climate-changing pollution.

The idea of building turbines offshore, where strong, steady wind could, in theory, generate large amounts of power, has long been seen as a vital step toward a future based on renewable energy.  Yet even as European nations installed thousands of the machines, American proposals ran into roadblocks, including high costs, murky rules about the use of the seafloor, and stiff opposition from people who did not want their ocean views marred by machinery.
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Jeffrey Grybowski and the company he runs, Deepwater Wind of Providence, R.I., have now done it.  They had a lot of help from the political leadership of Rhode Island, which has seized the lead in this nascent industry, ahead of bigger states like New York and Massachusetts.

Now, offshore wind may be on the verge of rapid growth in the United States.
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Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York set a goal of getting 50 percent of the state’s power from renewable sources by 2030, and the state will probably need large offshore wind farms to help achieve that.  In Massachusetts, a Republican governor, Charlie Baker, just signed a bipartisan bill ordering the state’s utilities to develop contracts with offshore wind farms for an immense amount of power, 50 times the expected output of the Block Island Wind Farm.
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Competitors are moving to challenge Deepwater Wind for the coming wave of offshore contracts, but the company hopes to hold its lead and win the next project, a proposed wind farm 36 miles off Montauk, N.Y., meant to supply the power-hungry South Fork of Long Island.

“I do believe that starting small has made sense,” said D. E. Shaw’s head of United States private equity investment, Bryan Martin, who is also Deepwater Wind’s chairman.  “I would say that the next projects are going to be substantially bigger.”

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