Winds of history

Updated Sept. 25

In the beginning, offshore wind came with promises of renewable energy, what it could mean for an Island that prides itself on a spirit of conservation and sustainability, and what an offshore project could do to create jobs for a growing year-round population. 

But now, as the dramatic history of the industry unfolds, many Islanders see what was the original vision for offshore wind and the Island is not the reality now. The dream of a small-scale locally owned offshore wind farm has been forgotten in the reality of nine massive projects backed by multinational corporations in Europe to build over 600 turbines south of Martha’s Vineyard. Some developers and local officials are being pressed with questions of accountability and transparency with Islanders under the impression there would be new benefits like affordable energy, more jobs, all while the cherished coastline would not be disturbed. Those impressions, at least as many Islanders understood them, have yet to pan out. 

Energy rates are high. Jobs that were promised for Islanders haven’t all arrived yet. And the turbines, which reach hundreds feet high and are clearly visible from Aquinnah down to South Beach, create an industrial landscape that some feel is a blight on Island’s viewshed of the open ocean.

Over the past two months, The Times set out to look at the history of Vineyard Wind, the first commercial-scale project in the country, conducting interviews with project leaders, local officials, and Islanders. The paper has reviewed documents, and even journeyed 15 miles offshore to see the project up close. The research is intended to establish a historical timeline to perhaps provide greater context for Islanders who may have failed to understand the fine print or missed important chapters in the past 15 years as the project evolved, and helps explain why some might be surprised by the view of the turbines from the coast.

And the recent official release, prompted by a Times reporter, of the Island’s only offshore wind community benefits agreement, which was the first of its kind in the nation, has some questioning if there isn’t an inherent conflict of interest baked in. The Island entity party to the contract receives money from the developer, leaving some to wonder who advocates for the Island in the face of large-scale development off its shores. Meanwhile, the town of Nantucket’s Select Board — which represents themselves on its community impact agreement — has recently brought offshore wind officials to the negotiation table to ask for further protections.

The saga of Vineyard Wind traces back decades to the implementation of the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, created in 1953, which then allowed for what became the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) to lease areas of federal waters for offshore wind development in the 2000s. (President Donald Trump, in an executive order on Jan. 20, temporarily withdrew the shelf from future leases.)

In November 2001, the large-scale, 130-turbine Cape Wind project was proposed on Horseshoe Shoal in Nantucket Sound. It would have become the country’s first offshore wind farm. But for more than a decade, the project faced fierce opposition, especially from locals on Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard, and some of them prominent critics with deep ties to the Island such as the late Sen. Ted Kennedy and the legendary CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite. The developers of the project relinquished the lease in May 2018.

But the nascent industry of renewable energy would not give up. Through persistence, offshore wind in Massachusetts didn’t begin to take off in the early 2010s. A catalyst for that was one Island nonprofit, now known as Vineyard Power.

VINEYARD POWER EMERGES

Vineyard Power was born out of the Vineyard Energy Project, a founder-based nonprofit started in 2003 and run by Kate Warner. Warner, who most recently was the energy planner for the Martha’s Vineyard Commission, through a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy, orchestrated the education and installation of solar projects on the Island. By 2008, though, “totally burned out,” she said, Warner turned the reins of the project over to two members of her board, engineer Paul Pimentel (who passed away in 2019) and Richard Andre, now current president and director of Vineyard Power, and previously an employee for British Petroleum for more than a decade.

The duo changed course, refocusing the project toward offshore wind development as the country set eyes on increased renewable energy, and Vineyard Power, a cooperative, was born in November 2009.

Simultaneously, the Martha’s Vineyard Commission’s Island Plan was adopted in December 2009, and called for community ownership of renewable energy facilities, and an electrical cooperative to facilitate that. “Because a community-owned entity that could contract for, finance, and manage utility-scale electrical generation facilities and future storage facilities is more likely to reduce user rates, it would also be more likely to gain public support of necessary projects,” the plan said. Vineyard Power was just that.

A membership for $50 bought a share in the cooperative, and profits were meant to come back to members as shareholders. 

Their original goal, on the heels of the contentious Cape Wind project, was previously reported as developing a 17-turbine wind farm sized for the Island’s energy consumption, and owned by Island residents.

“The whole Cape Wind controversy is that they’re going to build these 150 turbines out there, and we’re all going to be impacted by them, but the benefit is perceived to be going elsewhere,” Andre told the Vineyard Gazette in February 2010. “If we’re going to have turbines and be impacted by them, we might as well benefit from them.”

Dave McGlinchey, executive director of the Vineyard Energy Project from 2008 to 2010, and most recently chief of government relations for the Woodwell Climate Center, said Cape Wind “missed the mark” sans local benefit, ownership, and input. The Island’s nonprofit’s goal was to address the challenges of local opposition that Cape Wind didn’t anticipate. He was brought in to run the Vineyard Energy Project and help launch Vineyard Power.

McGlinchey, who spoke to The Times in his office in Woods Hole in June, said that he and other members of Vineyard Power, like Pimentel, worked to develop a locally owned project, and spent time, even through “conversations in living rooms,” to explain the idea and importance of renewable energy, especially when done through local ownership and buy-in. McGlinchey said they took inspiration from a 4.5 megawatt onshore wind farm that powers Fox Islands, Maine.

McGlinchey compared the idea to an “industrial farm share.”

“I think people felt heard, and not in a performative way, like there was a real process to gather input, and there was a real process to generate local ownership. And so we had, I would say, a groundswell of support, and we had a lot of people who were really enthusiastic about it,” McGlinchey said. But Vineyard Power hit a roadblock.

SCALING UP

The size and scale of development and federal regulations in the early 2000s made the project as planned infeasible. McGlinchey said that early on, they came to the unfortunate conclusion that a small-scale locally owned wind farm just wasn’t possible.

Instead, the nonprofit decided to partner with a larger developer called Offshore MW (financially backed by the investment management company Blackstone), to build what is now known as Vineyard Wind. Vineyard Power in alliance with Offshore MW “came to a collaborative agreement known as the Martha’s Vineyard Offshore Wind Alliance,” and submitted a lease application for an area in federal waters marked for development to BOEM on April 15, 2011, a newsletter to Vineyard Power members shared with The Times said. Offshore MW was acquired by Denmark-based Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners (CIP) from Blackstone in 2016.

“This was the first step toward receiving a federal permit to build and own an offshore wind farm which will power our Island,” the newsletter said.

The project now is a 62-turbine wind farm 15 miles south of the Island and is owned by CIP and Avangrid. It transfers energy to the New England grid through a cable in Barnstable.

And some Islanders feel duped. 

Brian Athearn, a 12th-generation Islander who originally felt the idea was reasonable, said he now feels deceived. “We were going to be a co-op in a wind farm. That’s what I told my kids. I was like, ‘This is going to be beautiful. It’ll be offshore. We can’t see it. It’ll be producing electricity. There’ll be people maintaining it. There’ll be Islanders with jobs,’” Athearn said.

[The agreement between Vineyard Wind and Vineyard Power states that five years after commercial operation is reached (reported by Iberdrola on pg. 25 of the 2025 First half Results Report to occur at the end of 2025), 100 percent of staff at the Operations and Maintenance Facility in Vineyard Haven would be sourced from the Island.]

Athearn, who gave his $50 to be a member of the cooperative years ago, said, “The part that drives me nuts is that we all invested $50 in a stake so that they would protect us, and it was like giving the fox the key to the hen house. I couldn’t even believe that, that we did that.” Athearn is involved with the Island arm of Green Oceans, a nonprofit organization against industrialization in the ocean that has lawsuits against offshore wind projects.

But the vision was forced to change. It “evolved from owning and operating a wind farm to partnering with an offshore wind developer to contractually secure the attributes and benefits of ownership through community benefits agreements,” a webpage on the nonprofit’s history reads.

A GROWTH IN HEIGHT

“This is not what they promised,” Athearn said. One gripe for Athearn, he said, is that he was told that he wouldn’t see the turbines from shore.

Vineyard Wind developed visual simulations (pg. 65-88) of the viewshed from the Island in 2017 that showed how visible the turbines would look from shore. A few years later, the company updated the project’s construction and operations plan for a larger turbine and made the determination that they would switch to the larger General Electric Haliade-X turbines (a 141-foot difference). They said that the change still fell within the updated project design envelope, a range of design parameters, and didn’t create additional adverse effects. BOEM came to the same conclusion.

WHO REPRESENTS THE ISLAND?

That community benefits agreement (CBA) that replaced physical ownership of a wind farm was signed on Jan. 15, 2015, after the lease was bought and the project started to move through the federal process for approval. Between Vineyard Power and Vineyard Wind, the CBA was the country’s first for the offshore wind industry. It gave the project a 10 percent discount on the lease.

McGlinchey, who left before Vineyard Power aligned with the developer and signed the community benefits agreement, said, “[I] wasn’t in the room, but I think Vineyard Wind saw this organization set up around large-scale energy generation, and they thought, What a great partner.”

But the agreement, now available online, has received some negative feedback, such as from Chilmark resident Fred Khedouri, who spoke to The Times after a Chilmark Select Board session on the topic. He questioned who speaks on behalf of the Island if the CBA sets up Vineyard Power to be paid more than $180,000 annually by Vineyard Wind. He said, “Regardless of the content or merits of the so-called community benefits agreement, it’s just fundamentally defective from a process standpoint, and so I think the town, Chilmark, and other towns, need to revisit this question, and they need to represent their citizens in coming up with a proper agreement.”

An attorney who specializes in CBAs also raised concerns. “The fact that they’re referred to as a subcontractor, and they’re regularly receiving money in exchange for services, make this feel less like a CBA and more like a service contract,” Julian Gross, a leading lawyer on CBA negotiations, based in San Francisco, said.

When asked why the document wasn’t public before, Vineyard Power officials said they reiterated obligations and benefits set forth in the agreement verbally, and were never asked by anyone to see the document. It wasn’t released until a Times reporter asked to see the document this summer.

“You would think that if the parties to the agreement are proud of the agreement and the benefits that it contains for the community, they would be posting it on their website and making it widely available in a proactive way,” Gross said. “More generally, if it’s true that no one has ever asked them about the agreement in the past, that’s kind of an indication of the lack of understanding the community had about the project.”

But Matthew Eisenson, who works for Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, said that CBAs are voluntary agreements and often not made public, especially when parties to the contract aren’t subject to public disclosure requirements. He added that what is required by some municipalities through community benefits ordinances falls short of what was gained in the Island’s CBA.

Recently, town officials in Chilmark expressed an intention to look at the current CBA and discuss whether there is room for changes. They also communicated a desire to set up agreements for the Island for other projects off the coast. Representatives from Chilmark, Aquinnah, West Tisbury, and Edgartown plan to meet Friday to discuss how to move forward.

But officials at Vineyard Power don’t see that as an option through the current agreement. Richard Andre, president and director of the nonprofit, told The Times on Sept. 3: “Vineyard Power remains committed to support[ing] the towns, and we encourage continued dialogue directly with elected state representatives, Vineyard Wind, and other offshore wind developers.”

Bill Lake, a member of the board of directors for Vineyard Power, reiterated this idea to The Times.

“I think Vineyard Power’s notion is that the CBA between Vineyard Power and Vineyard Wind was formed back when we were, as we say, a proponent of Vineyard Wind, and we wanted to make sure that benefits came directly to the Island, and our partnership was that we would help basically present Vineyard Wind to the Island community,” Lake said. He added that the CBA is more like a partnership contract.

He said that if some of the towns want to make a new deal with Vineyard Wind for further protections, the nonprofit supports them, but the process wouldn’t be done through the group.

Vineyard Power is also not allowed, as per the CBA, to provide services to other offshore wind developers, and so agreements for other projects would fall under towns’ authorities.

“It’s sort of late in the story to have a CBA entered into,” Lake said. He added that it’s not impossible, but typically, CBAs are entered into much earlier in the project.

South of Martha’s Vineyard

Among other benefits, part of the CBA is the resiliency and affordability plan (RAP), which allocates $7.5 million to the Island over 15 years. So far, Vineyard Power, per the website, allocated more than $3.7 million over the next 15 years for facilities to access solar technology, and committed funds to the West Tisbury library, the Tisbury senior center, and the Wampanoag Tribe. The nonprofit also assigned $200,000 annually to subsidize electricity costs to income-eligible households on the Island, donated $40,000 to the Island Housing Trust’s Kuehn’s Way housing project to subsidize solar costs, and pledged $210,000 for solar development at Meshacket Commons and Tackenash Knoll. Funds are implemented by Vineyard Power, but projects are recommended by an advisory committee that includes representatives of each town, the county, and the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah).

The Island initially received $500,000 from the RAP within 60 days of financial close of the Vineyard Wind project, which occurred on Sept. 15, 2021. However, more funds to the project won’t come until right after the project reaches commercial operation, currently expected to occur at the end of 2025.

After commercial operation, installments of $500,000 will come to the Island on an annual basis, but recent federal moves against the industry, such as a stop-work order issued to the Revolution Wind project 12 miles off the coast of Aquinnah, concern Massachusetts representatives that the Trump administration could target Vineyard Wind next, which would push back the timeline for when the Island sees those benefits.

Editor’s note: This story was revised to reflect that Vineyard Wind submitted an updated visual impact assessment after the height of the turbines was changed.