Offshore construction on the first offshore wind project to serve Massachusetts is done.
The final blades of the Vineyard Wind 1 project were installed Friday evening, a Vineyard Wind spokesman said, completing the project’s offshore construction program. The spokesman said the project continues to deliver some power to the New England grid. More work remains before the project is fully operational.
Eventually, the wind farm about 15 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard is expected to generate just more than 800 megawatts of power with its 62 turbines. The project’s energy comes ashore at a grid interconnection point in Barnstable.
A decade after Massachusetts chose to focus its pursuit of cleaner energy generation largely on offshore wind, construction is complete on Vineyard Wind 1 as the wind industry faces difficult political and economic conditions that have led to a reevaluation of the state’s climate and emissions plans and policies.
Vineyard Wind 1 was the first offshore wind project selected by Massachusetts utility companies with input from the Baker administration to fulfill part of a 2016 clean energy law, and could be the only Massachusetts offshore wind project to become a reality this decade. Subsequently selected projects ran into headwinds that developers determined threatened their ability to finance their projects and resulted in the termination of those contracts.
That Vineyard Wind 1 would be constructed at all has not always been a sure thing. Project developers originally planned to close financing on the project and begin onshore construction work in 2019, put the first turbine into the seabed in 2021 and begin generating electricity in 2022.
But the Trump administration in the summer of 2019 decided to undertake a broad study of the potential impacts of offshore wind projects planned up and down the East Coast, holding up a key permit approval for Vineyard Wind 1. Vineyard Wind announced on Dec. 1 of that year that it was pulling its project out of the federal review pipeline. The Trump administration declared the federal review of the project “terminated.”
Less than a month into Joe Biden’s presidency, in February 2021, the federal government resumed the review of the Vineyard Wind 1 project from the point at which the developer withdrew it. By May of 2021, the Biden administration had approved the project’s construction and operations plan and cleared the way for construction to begin.
The first electrons from the project began flowing in early 2024, but one of the project’s massive blades shattered in the summer of 2024, bringing operations to a halt and prompting investigations. Power production had resumed by January 2025.
When fully operational, Vineyard Wind 1 was projected to produce at least 3,600 jobs, reduce costs for Massachusetts ratepayers by an estimated $1.4 billion over 20 years and eliminate 1.68 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually.
