This Historic Community Is Pushing the Nation Toward a Wind Power Revolution
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By Elizabeth Royte - April, 2022
Block Island, off the New England coast, overcame political strife to lead the way on energy independence
Block Island, 15 miles off the coast at its farthest point, has always been at the mercy of the four winds. Raging winter gusts have been known to rip porches off houses and knock stones off the rock walls that lattice the island’s meadows and pastures. More regularly, breezes delivered to residents the drone of enormous diesel-burning generators, the Rhode Island community’s sole source of power. No one liked it, “but that was just part of island life,” a local real estate agent tells me. People got used to the noise, and those who lived near the power plant—less than half a mile from downtown—resigned themselves to frequently scrubbing soot from their windows and sills.
But then, at precisely 5:30 a.m. on the first of May, 2017, a great silence fell upon the land. The generators, after roaring for 89 years, shut down. And yet electrons continued to flow.
“Suddenly you could hear the leaves rustling, the waves breaking, and the birds”—Henry duPont, a local engineer who attended the diesel shutdown, breaks off, allowing the twitter and squawk of spring migrants to speak in his stead. Residents have been marveling at the quietude ever since.
Since that day, Block Island has been the only community in the United States fully powered by offshore wind: in this case, five 6-megawatt turbines pounded into the seafloor just south of the island’s Mohegan Bluffs. Over the next several years the Block Island venture will be joined by many more towns and cities, as up to 2,000 new turbines begin to populate utility-scale wind farms along the Atlantic Seaboard. These projects were fast-tracked a year ago when President Biden set a national goal of generating 30 gigawatts of offshore wind energy on both coasts and in the Gulf of Mexico by 2030. That’s enough juice to run ten million homes while avoiding the production of 78 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions.
“The loudest people against the wind farm considered the island their little paradise.”
From its inception, the Block Island Wind Farm, launched by a Providence-based company called Deepwater Wind, was meant to be a demonstration project. Not of the technology—European nations nailed that decades ago and now operate more than 5,000 offshore turbines—but of the knotty permitting process that allows a commercially financed power generator to plug into an established electrical grid. And smoothing the regulatory path will be essential if the nation is going to quit fossil fuels. According to a recent Princeton University study, total installed wind power must grow more than sixfold from today’s capacity for the nation to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by mid-century.
While tens of thousands of smaller wind turbines, rated at less than two megawatts, have stippled the American landscape since the 1970s, truly widespread wind power will depend on much larger devices. Wind speed tends to increase with altitude, and the taller the tower is, the larger the blades and the turbine can be, dramatically increasing energy production. For example, one of the tallest turbines in operation, General Electric’s Haliade-X, a 13-megawatt behemoth installed in Rotterdam, reaches about 80 stories high, and each blade is 351 feet long. In just seven seconds it generates enough power to serve the average American home for a day.
These giants will almost certainly be planted primarily at sea, where it’s easier to transport enormous blades and tower sections, there’s more space for arrays, and permitting hassles with property owners are reduced. “You’re not dealing with people’s backyards or other kinds of challenges over hundreds of miles,” says Matt Morrissey, a former vice president of Orsted, the Danish company that acquired the Block Island Wind Farm in 2018.
Offshore wind, especially in the Northeast, is stronger and more consistent than terrestrial wind because the ocean surface creates less drag than land, which is pocked with trees, buildings and mountains. Steady ocean temperatures also make for steadier wind. And with companies planning to site wind farms 12 or more miles from shore, reducing the ability to see them from living room windows, they’ve quelled some of the opposition that doomed the nation’s first proposed offshore wind farm, off Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
But not all of it.
On a damp May morning, when 80 percent of Block Island homes are still shuttered for the off-season, I meet with Dick Martin, who has been with the Block Island Power Company for more than four decades. Until the wind farm came online, Martin tended BIPCo’s five giant yellow diesel generators, which he shows me in metal sheds lined with din-dampening padding. Back in his office, he lets me heft a foot-long sample of the submarine cable that runs three miles from the wind farm to Block Island, and then another 20 miles to the mainland. As thick as a spiral ham, the cable section weighs 46 pounds.
Under heavy skies, we drive to Southeast Lighthouse, atop Mohegan Bluffs. From here, the first of the five wind towers, which form a nearly straight line, appears much closer than 2.9 miles. The turbine towers reach more than 330 feet above the sea surface. The white blades, each one 241 feet long, spin mesmerically, disappearing into the clouds. “I think they’re beautiful,” Martin says. Sculptural, others pronounce. Majestic.