Team Favorite: Massive Wind Turbines Are Rising From The Atlantic Ocean

Hi, it's West Kosova. We're taking a break this week, so here's an episode you might have missed and an update on this story. Since the show aired, a number of planned offshore wind projects in the northeastern US have been put on hold or are in doubt, mostly because of rising costs, and that's also raised doubts about President Biden's goal of reaching thirty gigawatts of offshore wind power

Federal regulators made it official. Vineyard Wind will be the first large scale offshore wind energy project in the United States. This project will generate enough electricity for about four hundred thousand homes. The CEO of Vineyard Wind, Lars Peterson, says this new project will kickstart the industry. Vineyard will be the first to use a new turbine that stands more than eight hundred and fifty feet tall, with each of its three blades stretching more than the length of a football field.

About fifteen miles south of Nantucket, off the coast of Massachusetts, a massive new wind farm is rising out of the Atlantic Ocean. The project is expected to start delivering electricity this fall. Those turbines will bring the Biden administration closer to its goal of the US generating thirty giglewatts of power from clean offshore wind by twenty thirty, but that goal won't be easy to reach. Building those super tall wind turbines is not cheap, and some projects have faltered.

Costs have gone up, price of steel has gone up. Giant towers use a lot of steel. All of a sudden, the project's costs are higher than they expected.

That's Bloomberg's will Wade. He got on a big boat to check out the wind farm, and a bit later I talked to Nick Schultz. He's a commercial diver working on this project, and I asked him what it's like to build a wind turbine in deep water.

Most of our day is just making sure it all.

Goes right, because you know, when you pick up something that weighs a million pounds. You got to have it as safe as you possibly can.

I'm west Kosova today on the Big Take the answer. My friend is blowing it.

Well, you know, will you went out to see this giant wind project.

What was it like?

It was really fun. I had to go to Cape Cod to the Like. All my coworkers were like, wow, that's a real hardship assignment.

Well, journalism can be tough.

It is.

We head at about two hours due south from Hyanas, out past Martha's vineyard, and then when we get there, there's six monopiles sticking out of the ocean. The monopile is the foundation that they're going to attach the turbines too. Eventually there's going to be sixty two turbines, so they'll have to do sixty two monopiles and then they go out and attach the turbine. So there were six of them there and they're sticking out of the ocean maybe fifty feet. But then a couple of miles away they've

And so they have these platforms, these monopiles that the turbines will go on. And then how big are the turbines themselves going to be? I think we've all seen those things, you know, the big blades spinning.

Yeah, if you've ever seen a wind turbine on land, you know it's big. But the ones they make for offshore they're even bigger. They're really big. So these are going to be about eight hundred and fifty feet tall. And I did a little math that works out almost exactly to the height of the Washington Monument with the Statue of Liberty stacked on top. This project's going to be sixty two of them. It's about eight hundred megawatts of capacity. That's going to be enough to power four

And how long has this been under development.

It's been under development for a long time. They got their initial power purchase agreement back in twenty eighteen.

So they're just now starting to put these turbines up. How long until this thing is up and running.

It's supposed to be complete in early twenty twenty four, but they told me that the first ones that are going to be installed, they're going to be wiring up as soon as they can. They should be delivering electricity in October already delivering.

Wow, that seems pretty soon.

Yeah, it's really soon. This will be the first electricity from a large scale US offshore wind project. There are two other offshore wind projects in service in the United States, but they're really just test projects. One is near Block Island. It's just thirty megawatts with five turbines. That was the first one. And then there's another one down in Virginia. It only has two turbines. There was really just a demonstration project.

So I imagine that people who like to use the beach and own property along the shoreline don't really want to look out and see giant turbine spinning. Can you see it from the shore.

I mean they're big. You could see them from a while, but I'm told that you will not be able to see it from the shore.

We talk a lot about how we're trying to wean ourselves from natural gas, from coal, from other fossil fuels and move toward wind and solar. Why did it take so long for our project like this to get underwig.

This has just been a slow moving industry in the United States, and certainly since this is the first big project, it's getting a lot of attention. They all have to go through a lot of environmental reviews. You've got to go through state and federal oversight, You've got to do all of those environmental impact studies. The fishermen had plenty to say about the topic. It takes a long time to get all of the approvals that you need.

And there's a whole bunch of other projects also planned up and down the East coast. Is that right?

Yeah. Offshore wind is a big component of the US's climate strategy, and there's about seventeen projects that are planned running all the way up from the mid Atlantic up to the Northeast. President Joe Biden has set a goal of having thirty gigawatts of offshore wind and service by twenty thirty, so we'll see if we get there. But we're starting to hit some snags because this is such

When you went to them and asked them about it, what did they have to say?

They said that they're hoping to find a way forward with their projects.

After the break the challenges of building more huge wind projects like this.

When I think about climate change, I think jobs, almost one hundred wind turbines going up off the coast of Massachusetts Rhode Island, jobs manufacturing two thousand and five one hundred ton steel foundations that anchor these offshore wind farm to the seafloor.

Will you mentioned before that President Biden has this goal of thirty gigawatts of wind power. Exactly what does that mean? A gigwatt sounds big, but what does that translate to.

Well, it is big, it's a lot of power, but what it translates to it's harder to measure. So, for example, Vineyard wind is going to be eight hundred megawatts.

A little side note here to help wrap our brains around this. There are one thousand megawatts in a gigawatt, So this eight hundred megawatt project is eighty percent of a gigawatt, and.

They say that's going to be enough for four hundred thousand homes in the area. So keep in mind it's in New England, because a gigawatt of power in New England isn't the same as a gigawatt of power in Texas. Way is that Texas is really hot. They use a lot of air conditioning. That's a lot of electricity, So a gigawatt there won't go as far as a gigawatt in Maine, where they don't need as much electricity.

So the idea is that powering an air conditioner is more than powering a light bulb exactly.

Plus you have to think about what kind of electricity it comes from. One of my standard measures is a nuclear power plant, a big conventional nuclear power plan. Most people can probably just imagine what it looks like. Those are about a gigawatt each, but they run night and day, twenty four to seven, almost three hundred and sixty five days a year. A gigawatt of wind power they're not going to run twenty four to seven. The best winds

Just because it's operating twenty four hours a day.

Because it runs around the clock.

They're placing these giant turbines out in the Northeast.

Why there, The US Northeast is one of the two best places in the world for offshore wind power, And there's two reasons for that. One, the winds are strong and consistent. And two, and this is really important, the water's not very deep. Vineyard Wind's going to be in about thirty to fifty meters of water. It's like one hundred to one hundred and fifty feet. That is not a huge engineering challenge. When you go off to California, for example, off the whole West coast, the water offshore

So what are they going to do about that? Is there a solution to that?

Yes, they're experimenting with floating wind farms, so they won't be on monopiles that are bolted to the bottom of the ocean. They're going to be literally these floating platforms with a wind turbine attached to it, and they're going to anchor them at the bottom. It's an experimental technology, but they say it's a lot easier to do because you can build it on shore and then tow it out to sea. So that should be faster and cheaper, but it's still new and unproven.

And those things aren't going to be bobbing in the water.

They will bomb in the water, but they have counterweights on the bottom, so they'll bob down and bob back up.

And the turbines will always stay straight up and down.

They'll move around a little bit, but not so much that they don't work.

Europe has been building these wind farms for a long time. They're way ahead of the US.

Why are they, Oh, it's really simple. They don't have as much space. Europe's not as big as the United States. If you drive across the country, you're going to see so much wind farms out in the middle of the country. In Iowa, Nebraska, they've got tons of space and it's really windy there. Europe is much especially Western Europe, it's much more dense. They don't have as much space. They had to go offshore. There's another reason why offshore wind to the US, especially on the East coast, is a

So then you have to run all those lines further.

Yeah, we need thousands of miles of transmission lines in this country. It's actually a huge problem for the renewable energy transition.

Are there any precautions they have to take they're building these things in the ocean, there's a lot of wildlife all around them.

Well, they're really concerned about whales. They don't want the construction to disrupt the whales. Everybody loves the whales. I'm out on the boat and that's really beautiful, and I was thinking, Wow, I hope we get to see some whales, and the people in the project, I hope we don't see whales. So if we see whales, we have to stop work.

So I actually have to pause the project as they see wheel.

Yeah, no construction allowed when there's whales in the area.

So how much is this big project going to cost?

A vineyard wing that's about four billion dollars, and that substation was like almost a quarter of it. It was like nine hundred million dollars for that.

Will you mention that there are a lot of other projects in the works up and down the East coast. What about in those big open spaces in the middle of the country. Are we going to start to see more and more wind farms across America?

Oh?

Yeah, Yeah, there's still plenty of wind farms under development all across the country. Wind and solar, Solar takes up a lot of space too. They're all key components of the green energy transition that the US is trying to pursue. They're even planning one in the Great Lakes Icebreaker wind in Lake Erie near Cleveland.

And how long do they think it'll take for Joe Biden's goal of thirty gigawatts of wind power to be real?

Well, the target's twenty thirty. We'll see if we get there. In terms of the projects that are delayed right now, I don't think that they're going to be killed. I think there's enough desire. I think there's enough interest from the governments and from state governments in having this clean energy. I think they're going to find a way forward, but it's going to take some time to work through.

This Will thanks so much for coming on the show. Happy to be here when we come back. What is like to go to work on the ocean floor?

My name's Nick Schultz.

I'm a member of pile Driver's local Union fifty six. I'm a commercial diver and pile driver, and I do all kinds of marine construction.

So, Nick, you've worked on some of these big offshore wind projects. Your work in the water is on the kind of the infrastructure that goes beneath these giant turbines. Yes, and that's really what's been happening right now as they're preparing to start putting up the first of them. Can you describe what that work is like. I mean, you're out in the middle of the water and you're putting in these really big structures to hold giant turbines.

Yeah, the foundations themselves, that's our kind of work. What we do here at the pile drivers We do the big monopiles, and those are enormous. They like thirty feet around in four inch thick steel and it takes them like almost a whole day to get one in.

But there's so much stuff we do in the water.

Recently, I started doing what's called a big bubble curtain, and that's like to reduce sound noises for the animal life in the area. It's really like an I've never seen it before, never even done it before, and it's like one of the neater things we do because they do acoustical readings.

So a bubble curtain what exactly is that.

It's a giant hose that they lay around the perimeter of the pile they're driving and they pump a large amount of air through it and it creates a continuous wall of air bubbles to the surface and it reduces the noise from the driving of the pile because it starts off at like one hundred and sixty decibels and with the bubble curtain, they can get it down closer to under one hundred.

And that's when they're trying to put down the foundation by basically just pounding it into the ocean floor.

They use a massive hammer that generates close to two million pounds of forest with each blow. They're trying to reduce the sound to protect the wildlife in the area.

And that's what they're using to stabilize these giant platforms.

Yeah, that's the initial foundation that these sit on, and they're massive and they go into the ground probably.

One hundred twenty feet one hundred and fifty feet.

What are they there for? Like, why are they trying to reduce the sound.

In water, sound travels like four and a half times faster than in the air, and when the sound hits the air bubbles it slows it down.

So they usually put one.

Or two of these curtains around to lessen the sound for in case there's any animals or wildlife in the area. It doesn't damage anything. I mean, they have a pretty strict protocol. They run where we're not allowed to work at all if they're and within a certain perimeter if they spot a whale, like, all work is stopped till the whale leaves the area for at least an hour or more before they let you continue working.

Does that happen a lot.

Yeah, some days it's really frustrating because you get all set up to go and then you can't do anything for half the day.

Can you describe what it's like to put one of these giant piles down.

The one ship on Vineyard Wind one it is the Orion. It's like nine hundred feet long. It has a massive crane. They put one of these big piles into like a cradle. They stand it up with this giant cradle, and then they set it on the seabed and they let it settle out, and then they swing the crane over and they put their giant hammer that then smashes it into the ground.

So once you have those piles down, then what happens.

They have to put a cage in that has sacrificial annos.

To keep it from rotting.

Most people, like me, I have no idea what a sacrificial anode is.

What is that They attach something that's like aluminum gives up. It rots away faster than the steel wheel, so the aluminum goes away before the steel does, so it protects that part of it, so it keeps it from rusting and rotting. They aluminum will disappear before the steel disappears. And then they put a transition piece on which is eighty seven to ninety feet tall, and that's the piece that gets it up to like a working platform. And then there's another section that goes up in the air

After there's a lot to it.

And what's this work like?

Like?

When you're doing it, can you describe just what it's like to work in that environment. I imagine it's pretty unusual. Like most people jobs are way different than this job.

I mean, honestly, the hardest part is being away from everybody because you go to work for four to ten weeks and just.

Not being home to do your normal things.

Or you know, like I have a wife and kids, I have a single mother at home while I'm at work, and that's probably the hardest part.

I imagine a large part of your job just must be troubleshooting what sorts of stuff can go wrong.

Well, most of our day is just making sure it all goes right, because you know, when you pick up something that weighs a million pounds, you've got to have it as safe as you possibly can. You got to look at everything a couple of times. You know, it's not like, you know, I drop a two by four building a shed, I might, you know, bruise my toe you drop something this big, I don't want to know what happens.

Well, I imagine you must have some pretty strict safety protocols.

We do. We do.

We go through one hundred and eighty hours of train on top of the training we already have.

We do a lot of.

And what is that training? What do you have to do, Like what's an example of the sort of safety training you have to do.

We do like a see survival training that the Global Window Organization puts on, a forty hour rigging course, another twenty four hour rigging course. We got to be CPR to the helicopter egress training, which is people find fascinating because they turn a helicopter upside down with us in it and drop it in the water and we have to escape it.

As part of the training, they ditch a helicopter in the ocean and you have to get out of it.

They have like a training center that they have like a car body of the helicopter that they do in a pool and safety divers.

But they do teach you how if your helicopter crashes, how.

To get out of it, because that's how you get to and from the site.

Yeah, at times we have to fly in and out, whether like if the ship can't make port and they have to do crew change, they'll change us out via helicopter.

You said that you spend weeks away. How long do you get off after you complete a shift.

Some of the boats are on six weeks on six weeks off. Some of them are four weeks on, four weeks off. But it's all subject to change on schedule, like sometimes it's give or take, but that's generally like your regular rotation. We work twelve hours a day, sometimes longer every day.

There's no real days off. There's always something to do.

You talked a bit about the safety training, but how do you learn how to do this work? Did you have to go to school for this?

Through my union, we have an apprenticeship program. This is a few of our members that haven't gone, but almost all of them have gone to it.

It's a four year training period.

I also went to dive school. I'm a certified commercial diver. That took me like six months also, so I've probably spent four or five years training myself on top of all our upgrades and what not. We get on top of it for specific projects like the wind farms.

Do you use diving in your work?

Yes, we have to do some work underwater, some underwater excavating. What's that like the First time I did it, it was a little scary because I was brand new, probably like ten twelve years ago. That's what I started doing was submarine cable work.

When you go into the water, now, are you still a little bit?

Oh?

Now, no, I'm pretty confident. But when I was new, you go twenty thirty one hundred feet under the surface.

Of the water, and it's a little nerve wracking to be in with.

Yeah, I imagine, how'd you decide to get into this work?

When I was younger, I was.

I worked as a driller for a little while, and I had met some commercial divers. When the housing crash around two thousand and eight started, I was having trouble finding decent employment there for a year or two, and I remember the divers telling me that they made pretty good money all the time, and I was like, well, there's water everywhere and old bridges around this country.

I'm sure that will keep me employed for a long time. And then once I got to it, it was the variety of jobs. I like. I probably have seven jobs I do.

What's best part of your job?

I like what I do.

It's big, it's neat, not a lot of people get to do it.

It's always an adventure. Nick.

I really enjoyed talking to you. Thanks for taking the ten Okay, thank you, thanks for listening to us here at the Big Take. It's a daily podcast from Bloomberg and iHeartRadio. For more shows from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen and we love to hear from you. Email us questions or comments to Big Take at Bloomberg dot net. The supervising producer of The Big Take is Vicky Ergalina. Our senior producer is Catherine Fink.