According to Bloomberg, Massachusetts residents will be able to save around $1.4 billion over the next 20 years due to the first commercial-scale offshored wind farm in the United States.
The wind farm, which will be located south of Martha’s Vineyard, is being developed by Avangrid Inc. and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, and has contracts between National Grid Plc, Eversource Energy, and Unitil Corp. The 800-megawatt wind farm is expected to “provide power and renewable energy credits for 6.5 cents a kilowatt-hour.” This will make the Vineyard Wind project about 18 percent cheaper than other power alternatives, according to Bloomberg.
The wind farm is expected to lower residents’ monthly energy bills by about 0.1 percent to 1.5 percent. It will also minimize Massachusetts’ carbon footprint as well: “It will reduce the state’s carbon emissions by more than 1.6 million tons per year, the equivalent of removing 325,000 cars from the road,” Bloomberg says.
Construction of the Vineyard Wind project will begin in 2019, and is expected to be up and running by 2021. Massachusetts also has a goal of “installing 1,600 megawatts of offshore wind, enough to power about 1 million homes, by 2027.”
What decision makers should take away:
While the Vineyard Wind project is a big step, this is a small piece in the international goal to reduce carbon emissions and save power users’ money. Other countries are have been utilizing power saving-project all along, Bloomberg says. For example, as the cost of installing wind power continues to drop, offshore wind is “expected to grow by 16 percent annually through 2030, driven by installations in the U.K., Germany, Netherlands and China, according to BNEF.”
As a result, companies and institutions looking to go green with energy consumption might consider utilizing power from a wind farm. They don’t have to build something at the same scale as the Vineyard Wind project; they can work with developers to design a solution that fits their needs and space. Plus, aside from playing a role in cleaning up the planet, there are other “green benefits” decision makers and consumers might be able to benefit from with wind farm energy. For example, in the case of the Vineyard Wind project, Bloomberg said that federal tax credits and long-term power-purchase agreement made the project attractive to consumers.
And, the more decision makers, companies and institutions alike invest in wind farm solutions and others, the quicker the United States can catch up to the rest of the world.
“The general consensus was that it would take a while for new markets to reach levels we’ve seen in Europe and the U.S. seems to be doing this pretty fast,” Lars Thaaning Pedersen, chief executive officer of Vineyard Wind, said in a statement, reported by Bloomberg.
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