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New Hampshire colleges, trade workers and policy makers have high hopes for job growth in the Northeast’s burgeoning offshore wind industry, even if we’re
Credit Dennis Schroeder / National Renewable Energy Labs
Offshore wind advocates in New Hampshire have high hopes after federal regulators this week approved construction of the Vineyard Wind project in Massachusetts – the largest offshore wind farm yet to reach the construction stage in the U.S.
At 800 megawatts in capacity, Vineyard Wind’s 62 turbines will be able to generate as much power as many nuclear reactors.
The project’s approval comes after delays under the Trump administration and is a first step toward President Biden’s climate change goals, which include the development of 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030.
The Gulf of Maine will likely house many of those turbines, but it will be years before any are approved or built. New Hampshire is working with Maine and Massachusetts on a federal task force to plan for that new industry, but the group has met only once, in late 2019 at UNH.
The Seacoast region is in the early stages of evaluating the challenges and opportunities of offshore wind renewable energy generation with wind turbines off the local coastline.
Because the more than 800-foot-tall wind turbines would be anywhere from 10 to 20 miles away from the shore, experts said, they should not be very visible from the shore and they will be out far enough to avoid interfering with commercial fishing operations.
But building a multi-billion-dollar offshore wind project like this requires a lot of upfront work to build the labor workforce and industry infrastructure for the project and to maintain it for the long term, experts say. The planning is still in its infancy, so construction of an undertaking like this is still at least five to seven years out.