$760 million and rising

By David Italiaander, 5/23/2024

Based on information from a Maine Department of Transportation application to the U.S. Department of Transportation for a Multimodal Project Discretionary Grant, the wind port that the state wants to build on Sears Island will cost $760 million. MDOT is requesting $456 million in MPDG funds, leaving $304 million for Maine taxpayers and maybe some other federal grants, and money from lease payments.

That begs the question of why is the cost of the wind project now $290 million more than last July?

Ultimately, I believe, the problem resides with the VolturnUS foundation. The 20-year-old design, patented in 2009, is untested at full size, unproven, and obsolete long before it can be deployed. There is no reason to believe this high cost, high LCOE (levelized cost of electricity) foundation can ever be commercialized. Yet the state wants to spend close to a billion dollars on a purpose-built manufacturing facility specifically tailored to the unique manufacturing needs of the University of Maine-designed floater.

There was no competition to assess other, competitive, designs more likely to succeed commercially. They didn’t investigate the port requirements and costs for the assembly of other floating foundations, nor did they find out which foundations have the lowest LCOE, which is the main driver in consumer utility rates.

There was no examination of what is currently being commercially deployed, at scale, in the North Sea.

Ironic, I suppose, in part because they are shutting down the 22-year-old floating wind farm there, the world’s oldest, for “heavy maintenance” while the world’s largest floating wind farms are operating there.

Nor did they look at a floating wind farm off Portugal that has been grid-connected since 2020. It seems little, if any, due diligence was performed at all.

And now we have learned that that VolturnUS foundation has washed out of the Department of Energy’s Floating Offshore Wind ReadINess competition to “develop offshore wind supply chains,” failing to advance from phase 2.

The rules for the nine competitors in the second phase of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory-sponsored competition read: “During Phase Two, teams will research and develop plans to transition their floating platform technologies from proven designs to serial production for deployment in gigawatt-scale wind farms.” It seems they failed.

We don’t yet know why the UMaine floater foundered but the fact that all five finalists have two similar attributes speaks volumes. They all tout some form of modularity, allowing for flexibility in manufacturing, either on site or at satellite locations (i.e., Bath Iron Works) and also have modest port requirements to assemble the modules. Both attributes drive down costs, contributing to a lower LCOE and promising serial production of one completed turbine per week.

The VolturnUS foundation has neither attribute.

The sad fact is that the VolturnUS foundation should have been deployed 15 years ago but wasn’t because the LePage administration was firmly against it. But now its time has come, and gone.

If Maine is to get it right, the Mills administration must change course.

It needs to set a goal of rapid deployment of the lowest-cost floating offshore wind turbines by minimizing port development costs and maximizing industrialized serial production of the most competitive foundations and turbines. It could save hundreds of millions of dollars, quantifiable only by an open examination of the alternatives.

It also could allow for faster deployment from a modified Mack Point Terminal, mainly requiring a suitable quay, a very tall crane, lay-down areas for blades and nacelles, and storage for the modular components. The planned Salem, Massachusetts, wind port is only 42 acres, and they claim they will be floating foundation-capable.

Sears Island can still be reserved for future transportation needs and we can make real progress toward the 3-gigawatt goal in the Gulf of Maine by decade’s end.

But it must begin with turning the page on the VolturnUS foundation and starting anew.

David Italiaander has over 50 years of experience in international trade, shipping, ports and terminals that inform his pragmatic, fact-based approach. He lives in Searsport.

This Op-Ed also appears in:
https://waldo.villagesoup.com/opinion/commentary/760-million-and-rising/article_c0b73748-16b5-11ef-8f51-8bca8cfe06aa.html
Reprinted here with the author’s permission.