NEW BEDFORD, Mass. — August 1, 2012 — Today, it is a 28-acre field with a dramatic waterfront view of New Bedford Harbor and its picture-postcard lighthouse. But within a few years, and with $35 million in public funds, city officials plan to convert the site into a bustling hub with hundreds of workers assembling giant wind turbines and loading them on ships bound for Cape Wind, the Nantucket Sound wind farm, and eventually for even larger offshore wind energy developments.
As proposals for wind farms off the coast of New England proliferate, New Bedford is hoping to capitalize on one very specific part of this alternative energy puzzle: the need for a waterfront facility where giant turbine components can be organized, assembled, and delivered to sites miles from land. The idea is to create hundreds, and potentially thousands, of high-paying jobs.
“We want to establish ourselves as the go-to port for wind energy assembly,” said Mayor Jon Mitchell.
The problem: competition from other port locations that are eyeing the same opportunity, including Quonset Point on Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island and sites in Delaware and New Jersey.
And then there is the uncertain future of offshore wind energy. The industry has struggled to surmount not only regulatory and environmental hurdles but competition from lower-cost energy sources, conventional as well as sustainable.
“There’s absolutely a need for port-based support for wind energy, but the real question is how big the offshore wind opportunity will turn out to be,” said Matt Kaplan, an analyst at IHS Emerging Energy Research in Cambridge.
In late 2010, Governor Deval Patrick revealed that Cape Wind had chosen New Bedford — with a population just under 100,000, it is the sixth-largest city in Massachusetts — as its staging area. The planned New Bedford Marine Commerce Terminal would be built with $35 million in state and federal funds, and construction would be managed by the state and the quasipublic Massachusetts Clean Energy Center.
Read the full story at the Boston Globe.