November 22, 2019 — With proposals pending to install giant turbines to generate wind power in the Atlantic Ocean a transmission company announced Thursday a 20-year plan to bring transmission ashore without splaying a mass of power cables along the bottom of the ocean.
Anbaric, a Wakefield, Mass.-based company that specializes in early stage development of large-scale electric transmission systems and storage solutions, filed an application with the U.S. Department of the Interior proposing non-exclusive rights-of-way to develop the “southern New England OceanGrid,” an offshore transmission system intended to boost the region’s offshore wind resources. It’s proposing corridors through which cables would bring power to Connecticut and elsewhere in southern New England.
“A planned grid approach makes sense,” said Peter Shattuck, Anbaric’s vice president for distributed energy. “The desire is to not have cables snaking willy nilly across the ocean floor.”
The transmission network on the outer continental shelf would link wind lease areas using a common system and deliver power to the on-shore grid. Anbaric touts greater efficiency, improved reliability, less of an environmental impact and the ability to direct the energy to specific areas. The Southern New England OceanGrid would be developed in phases and anticipates an offshore transmission network connecting up to 16,000 megawatts of offshore wind to Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island.