PEOPLE FLOCK TO Barnstable for the beaches, but offshore wind developers are coming to that section of Cape Cod for a different reason.
Ken Kimmell, vice president of offshore wind development at Avangrid, said the Cape is a unique location as far as his industry is concerned. “One of the things I learned on this job is that there is a relative shortage of places along the East Coast that can connect to the electric grid and have the capacity to take the power,” he said on The Codcast. “Barnstable happens to be one of those relatively small number of places that has the capacity to take the power.”
In addition to access to the region’s power grid, Kimmell said Barnstable is also relatively close to the wind farm lease area (25 to 40 miles away), which keeps costs down for developers and ratepayers. “We’re saving ratepayers money because the longer the transmission line the more the project costs,” Kimmell said. “That’s really why we’re in Barnstable.”
Three wind farm developers currently have plans to use Barnstable as their interconnection point to the power grid. Making Barnstable the landing point for all three transmission lines allows the cables to follow roughly the same path from the wind farms to shore, reducing the impact on the ocean floor. And Barnstable is also benefiting, through developer payments to the town and financial and technical support in building a municipal sewer system to address nitrogen pollution caused by leaking septic systems.
“By locating in Barnstable we not only get climate change and clean energy benefits, we get direct water quality benefits, which addresses one of the biggest threats people on the Cape have, which is water quality deterioration,” Kimmell said.
Kimmell dismissed concerns raised by two residents on a recent Codcast about bringing power ashore on bucolic Cape Cod rather than closer to major population centers where the power is needed. He said Vineyard Wind’s already-completed transmission line coming ashore at Covell’s Beach is the answer to those concerns.
“It looks just like it did before, no sign that anything happened there,” Kimmell said, noting that the only difference is that the new parking lot at Covell’s now has manhole covers.
He said the same construction approach that was used at Covell’s Beach will be used at the other Barnstable beaches. “When we do the work at Dowses Beach [in Osterville], we’re going to be drilling under the beach. We’re not going to be tearing it up. We’re not going to be digging trenches,” he said.
Kimmell said the high voltage power lines running beneath the beaches and town streets don’t present any danger to residents. “We don’t think there’s a safety issue here at all,” he said.
Somerset’s Brayton Point, the site of a former coal-fired power plant with a built-in connection to the power grid, is being pursued by SouthCoast Wind as the landing spot for a transmission line from its proposed wind farm. Aside from Brayton Point, there are no other interconnection points being talked about in Massachusetts other than Barnstable.
Meet the Author
Editor, CommonWealth
About Bruce Mohl
Bruce Mohl is the editor of CommonWealth magazine. Bruce came to CommonWealth from the Boston Globe, where he spent nearly 30 years in a wide variety of positions covering business and politics. He covered the Massachusetts State House and served as the Globe’s State House bureau chief in the late 1980s. He also reported for the Globe’s Spotlight Team, winning a Loeb award in 1992 for coverage of conflicts of interest in the state’s pension system. He served as the Globe’s political editor in 1994 and went on to cover consumer issues for the newspaper. At CommonWealth, Bruce helped launch the magazine’s website and has written about a wide range of issues with a special focus on politics, tax policy, energy, and gambling. Bruce is a graduate of Ohio Wesleyan University and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He lives in Dorchester.
About Bruce Mohl
Bruce Mohl is the editor of CommonWealth magazine. Bruce came to CommonWealth from the Boston Globe, where he spent nearly 30 years in a wide variety of positions covering business and politics. He covered the Massachusetts State House and served as the Globe’s State House bureau chief in the late 1980s. He also reported for the Globe’s Spotlight Team, winning a Loeb award in 1992 for coverage of conflicts of interest in the state’s pension system. He served as the Globe’s political editor in 1994 and went on to cover consumer issues for the newspaper. At CommonWealth, Bruce helped launch the magazine’s website and has written about a wide range of issues with a special focus on politics, tax policy, energy, and gambling. Bruce is a graduate of Ohio Wesleyan University and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He lives in Dorchester.
Offshore wind developers currently are responsible for delivering the power they produce to the grid. States are talking about having offshore wind developers share transmission infrastructure in the future to save costs and to reduce the spread of transmission lines, but Kimmell said right now that’s just an idea with many questions that need to be answered.
“These questions can be resolved, but I’ve been in the development and permitting business for a very long time and I think it’s fair to say if you add up all the time it will take to plan this transmission, get buy in, figure out who’s funding it, deal with the technical issues, and then go through permitting, you’re a decade away from actually having a shared system,” he said.
In the meantime, Kimmell said, roadblocks shouldn’t be thrown in the way of current interconnection points in Barnstable and Brayton Point in Somerset. “Climate change isn’t waiting,” he said.
