In the wake of the Biden administration’s announced goal to see 30 GW of offshore wind generation built by 2030, two of the industry’s major developers are stressing that carefully coordinated port development must occur first, which could take years and require massive funding through public-private partnerships.

In a conversation with representatives of port authorities and state economic development agencies at the three-day Reuters US Offshore Wind 2021 conference Thursday, John Pauling, U.S. construction lead for Ørsted, said expensive port infrastructure upgrades could take up to four years and must be done on time.

“That timeline is really critical to make sure that the upgrades are there as required to support the overall project,” he said. And the cost, he added, could range from tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars. Some of it should be public financing, he said.

“I think public-private partnerships are a critical part of that, to look at having a vested interest,” he said. “The infrastructure upgrades that the ports are going to have are going to be there long beyond the actual functionality of the logistics and the construction. So, there’s definitely a residual long-term benefit on the business case side.

“When you’re talking about large federal dredging projects, the timelines are exceedingly long. Anything we can do to kind of expedite and get through the process faster, and the ports can assist, I think that’s absolutely imperative,” he said.

Doug Copeland, development manager for Atlantic Shores Offshore Wind, a partnership between Shell New Energies and EDF Renewables North America, said scheduled upgrades could be a determining factor in whether a particular port is used.

“As states and private entities look to see if their ports are going to be viable for offshore wind, it’s really about the schedule. Is it going to be available at the right time? And that means a whole lot of things. It means that it has the financing, its own permitting is in the place for construction, and then potentially dredging.

“And then you just have the overall construction timing. There are certain things that you can rush, and certain things, especially around soil, you cannot. Another thing we have been running into: Is the port heavily subscribed? We are trying to make the pie bigger. … We’re not just trying to fight for port space with other users. That again becomes a limiting factor.”

He added that his company especially does not want to crowd commercial fishing vessels or recreational boating.

In answer to a question from panel moderator Maki Onodera, an engineer with New York City-based Jacobs Engineering, about the overall functionality of East Coast ports for the offshore wind industry, Copeland said some ports simply don’t have the load capacity.

“The bearing capacity, the load capacity of some of the ports … some cannot handle a tower section or a nacelle or some of the very heavy pieces of equipment,” he said.

Others are limited because of the lack of nearby land for manufacturing, or storage and assembly of the enormous wind turbine components.

“That’s where you see the states leading the way, especially if these ports require more acreage. On the operations maintenance side, that’s really on us developers to find ways to leverage what’s there. … You see the announcements of developers up and down the East Coast … to find those existing ports that they can help make better through their use or, at the very least, just pop into existing infrastructure … that is literally designed for this type of work.”

Port Authorities Chime in

Representatives of state development agencies and port authorities participating in the panel are well aware of the problems outlined by Copeland and Pauling.

Cathie Vick, chief development and government affairs officer for the Virginia Port Authority, said her agency has been involved with several developers to understand what they require. She said the state, in an early effort to site an offshore wind energy area, created a collaborative of state and federal agencies a decade ago “to work through ‘de-conflicting’ the traffic in and out of the harbor.”

“We wanted to make sure it wasn’t going to impede both commercial container vessels [and] recreational vessels that have been mentioned, but we also have a large military presence here in Hampton Roads. So, working together to make sure that there was going to be the free flow of these vessels offshore wind vessels in and out of our harbor was step 1,” she said.

The state also realized its ports, even those built to handle container and bulk vessels, did not have the capacity to handle the size and weight of the offshore wind components, she said. The state has already spent $40 million on infrastructure upgrades, she added.

“We started very early on doing appropriate geotechnical work and having engineering firms come in and help guide us on what improvements would need to be made, and what were the costs of those improvements, so that we could start identifying funding streams both at the state and federal level; and then obviously capital contributions from the developers themselves or manufacturers who might want to locate on those facilities,” she said.

David Kooris, chair of the Connecticut Port Authority’s (CPA) board of directors, said the state announced a request for proposals in 2018 to operate its facility at the deep-water port of New London as the existing contract was set to expire.

CPA chose Gateway Terminal, a New Haven-based private terminal operator, which had partnered with Ørsted and Eversource Energy to submit the winning bid. CPA signed a harbor development agreement with Gateway and its new partners in 2020, Kooris said.

The agreement “is a pretty robust plan for upgrading the facility with heavy lift capacity, increased load bearing, additional laydown areas both through the acquisition of adjacent lands and with the filling in of some land between finger piers, dredging and so forth.

“It’s about a 70-30 cost split, with the state bearing 70% of the costs, and Ørsted and Eversource 30%. And it’ll result in at least a 10-year utilization of the facility by them for first the construction of the projects that they have power purchase agreements with New York and Connecticut and Rhode Island for, and then we hope many projects,” he said.

Already under construction and expected to be completed next year, the pier will become the Northeast staging hub for Ørsted and Eversource, Kooris said.

Peter Lion, senior adviser for offshore wind with the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority,  and Julia Kortrey, senior project director of offshore wind for the New Jersey Economic Development Authority, also took part in the panel discussion.

“New York is excited to see the industry continue to develop, and we’re utilizing a strategic approach to invest in both large infrastructure projects, as well as engaging small- to medium-size enterprises,” Lion said, “to drive a path towards local development.

“The key to unlocking true economic development and economic growth associated with both supply chain and workforce is infrastructure development, localizing component manufacturing … on a short-term project-by -project basis.

“We believe that we captured that through our 2020 solicitation, which combined solicitation with a multi-port investment strategy aimed to incentivize private investment, and to maximize economic benefits and job creation. The strategy required wind generators to partner with any of 11 pre-qualified ports for staging construction, manufacturing and key components for operations and maintenance,” he said.

The competition concluded with the state awarding Equinor Wind a contract to build 2.5 GW. Equinor and its partner, BP, are building an additional 1,260 MW in the New York Bight.

New Jersey took a different path: build a new port for the offshore projects serving the state’s renewable energy needs. The state is expecting to break ground this fall for a 200-acre New Jersey Wind Port on the Delaware River in southern New Jersey at an anticipated cost of $300 million to $400 million. Completion of this initial phase is expected by 2023, Kortrey said.

“This also dovetails well with our nearby assets, like our Port of Paulsboro, where a monopile fabrication facility has already broken ground and in the process of staffing up to produce monopiles in the coming years,” she said.

“And then [we are] looking at nearby ports like the Port of Salem [on the Salem River about 2 miles from the Delaware River], which is a much smaller port that can be used for some of the ancillary services that folks have been discussing,” she said. “We recognize that storage and laydown space is increasingly a challenge as we want to produce as much as possible in the United States.”