The United States is moving closer to seeing the construction of its first-ever offshore wind farm with the signing of the country’s first offshore wind farm lease, for the 468-megawatt Cape Wind project.
Interior secretary Ken Salazar met with Jim Gordon, president of Cape Wind Associates L.L.C., on Wednesday to sign the lease after delivering a keynote address for the American Wind Energy Association’s North American Offshore Wind Conference in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
“This crucial milestone opens a new chapter of clean electricity production and a new source of jobs for our nation,” said Mr. Gordon.
The lease authorizes the controversial Cape Wind project to start building the offshore wind farm on the waters of the Horseshoe Shoal in Nantucket Sound in Massachusetts. The lease allows Cape Wind 25 years to run the facility.
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To harness the local wind resource, the facility will use 130 units of 3.6-MW Siemens wind turbines.
The wind farm is expected to create up to 1,000 jobs during its construction phase and an additional 150 jobs during its operation.
But the industry leaders said it is just as important that the lease expresses the country’s openness to future offshore wind developments.
“The signing of this lease sends an important market signal to the offshore wind industry that the United States is ready to move forward and that Cape Wind will be the first of many offshore wind projects in this country,” said Mr. Gordon.
Electric utility National Grid has already finalized a power purchase agreement with Cape Wind for the wind farm’s output. National grid will start buying 50 percent of the offshore wind farm’s output in 2013 at a rate of 18.7 cents per kilowatt-hour.
This rate would increase by an average of 3.5 percent each year if the project is completed by then. If only a portion of the wind farm is built, the starting price would be rated at 19.3/kWh.
The new rate comes after opposed groups warned in July that cities and towns throughout Massachusetts would suffer from increased charges cumulatively totaling over $1.5 million annually in order to pay for the offshore wind farm.
In fact criticism on the wind farm’s costs is but the latest in a number of challenges that have been posed to the project, which the Interior Department cleared of potential harmful environmental impacts, ever since its consideration.
“The Cape Wind lease represents progress toward taking that lead back for America, and keeping not only construction jobs, but also wind manufacturing jobs, right here at home instead of having to watch them go to China and Europe,” read a statement from Denise Bode, chief executive of the wind association.
