Mark Rodgers discusses Cape-Wind, the USA's first offshore wind park

Beyond Zero talks to Mark Rodgers, Communications Director for Cape Wind, the USA's first off-shore wind farm. Advocacy and opposition, technical specifications, construction details and financing all feature in Mark's discussion with presenters Matthew Wright and Scott Bilby.

Mark Rodgers podcast

download

Transcript

Scott Bilby: This morning, or should I say for Mark it will be this afternoon, we are going to be speaking to Mark Rodgers, communications director for Cape Wind. Cape Wind is a project proposing America's first offshore wind farm on Horseshoe Shoal in Nantucket Sound which is in the state of Massachusetts in north-eastern USA. The aim is to have 130 wind turbines harnessing wind to produce clean renewable energy. The Cape Wind project has been developed by Energy Management Incorporated. Mark joins us from the United States.

Hello Mark, thank you for joining us.

Mark Rodgers: Pleased to be with you, thanks for having me.

Scott: We're very pleased to have you with us. We usually start off by asking our guests how they got interested in renewable energy. Can you tell us a little bit about your background?

Mark: Well, sure. I got involved and interested in energy as a volunteer activist. My day job had nothing to do with it, but on nights and weekends I volunteered for a group that was campaigning against dirty power plants. We had an old 1950s era coal and oil power plant where I used to live in Salem, Massachusetts, and we were campaigning to get them to clean up and modernise or to shut down, and in the course of doing that we were also advocating for better alternatives, like clean renewable energy.

I kind of gravitated towards a communications role in that group, talking to the press, giving presentations and the like, and when the Cape Wind proposal came on the scene, initially I was just showing up to the early meetings as a third-party advocate representing that citizens' group, just explaining why from a public health standpoint it was so important to go in this direction. One thing led to another, it was a classic expression of being at the right place at the right time, and I was able to talk my way into a job.

Matthew Wright: Fantastic.

Scott: I guess that's a real skill for someone who ends up being a communications director; if you can't talk yourself into a job, what can you do? It shows what initiative, a bit of hard work and guts and determination can do. Can you tell us about the Cape Wind project itself?

Mark: Yes. As you indicated, Cape Wind would be America's first offshore wind farm. We were the first proposal. As you may know, they've been doing offshore wind in European waters since 1991, so it's not a new idea or new technology, but here in the US, although we have vast potential for doing offshore wind, we haven't done any yet. And although Cape Wind as a proposal has been on the scene since 2001…we've spent the better part of this decade trying to work through a bit of a cumbersome review process, but the good news is we think we are now just weeks away from final approval and we hope to soon be America's first offshore wind farm, which in average wind conditions would be providing that whole area of Cape Cod and the islands of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket with three-quarters of their electricity needs.

Scott: We're very excited to know that that sign-off might happen in the next few weeks. We'll talk about that soon, that's great news to hear, but we'll let the audience find out a little bit more just about the project in general. So you've told us how much power it will produce. We were watching a video on the website, I think we were watching it on YouTube, and they had a lot of opposition apparently to the site, and it seems like a lot of specious arguments are used against the wind site. Who were your opponents and who were your supporters?

Mark: When our proposal became public…you know, it is a large project and would be visible from shore on the distant horizon, the closest point to land would be about five, five-and-a-half miles, so the wind turbines would be about a half an inch on the horizon if you were standing on one of the closest beaches on a clear day and you stretched your arm out in front of you and separated your thumb and index finger. Some people were aghast at such a suggestion, and I would say in very short order to our proposal becoming public a fairly well organised and deeply resourced group came into existence to oppose the project. This many years later they've spent about $20 million trying to stop the project.

But fortunately for us we've also had a lot of grassroots support on the Cape and islands, and an organisation formed also to support the project in the community called Clean Power Now, and they've done great advocacy. But we've also had very strong support from pretty much all the major environmental organisations active here in the United States, from Greenpeace to Sierra Club to the Union of Concerned Scientists and many others. And organised labour, the unions, have been very supportive as well because they see this as a very important way to get a lot of good jobs for their members.

Scott: It showed views of proposed wind farms on this YouTube video we were watching, and it was interesting because somewhere they seemed to have a shot that looked back at the beach at a lot of big mansions on the beach which are built right up, right onto the sand, and it's funny how people never consider how damaging and destructive and aesthetically unpleasing it is to have mansions built right up on the beach like that. But anyway that was just a little aside I wanted to make.

Mark: Well, you know, in a related note, I know your show is about climate change and, let's face it, Cape Cod and the islands, this whole land mass was created at the end of the last ice age by a retreating glacier and it sticks way out into the ocean, and we don't have a lot of bedrock here, it's a long sand-spit really, and we are more at risk to the effects of rising sea levels from climate change than any part of the coastline in the north-east United States. So it's fitting in many ways that the first offshore wind farm would be proposed here, not that one wind farm can reverse a planetary climate phenomenon, but it's only initiatives like this, only all around the world, that is going to help us try to responsibly do that.

Scott: I recently heard that we had a scientist in Australia who commented on rising sea levels and had threats made to him by Australian real estate agents, but I won't go into that any further! With the appearance of President Obama on the scene, I'm sure that has been welcomed by the wind industry in the United States?

Mark: Absolutely, in fact just this week it's Earth Day here in the US, and President Obama marked that occasion at a speech at a wind turbine manufacturing facility in Iowa, and in his speech he announced that the US Department of Interior has finalised its offshore wind program. So now there's official codes and rules in the US for the first time, formally, in being able to review and approve projects like ours. As I said earlier, fortunately in our case, although it's been a long process, our review process is closing toward an end.

Matthew: Is there still any profit in it for you after having to battle this hugely organised, well funded anti-wind campaign?

Mark: Well, we hope so. At this point we're $40 million into this and no revenue, so I guess you could say it's an unsustainable business model, at least so far. But we've stuck it out because we've always believed in the merits of the project and felt that as long as we could get through a review process, any dispassionate review of the facts would show that this project was in the public interest and had very little in the way of any negative impacts.

Matthew: I guess it's how the west was won, you know?

Mark: Right, yes, the trailblazer…I mean, somebody's got to go first and oftentimes being first means you have a tougher row to hoe, but at the same time if you can be successful doing it, there's also a certain amount of satisfaction that goes along with it.

Matthew: We've had our Cape Wind here in Australia and it was called the Bald Hill wind farm, and it was exactly the same deal; all the people who travel from Melbourne where we live down to their beach houses wouldn't like the sight of wind farms along the way as they're driving towards their beach houses, so it's the same kind of thing. But that had some interesting politics, and then finally it was overturned and that wind farm can now be built, so that really created the path for all the other wind farms to be built, so this is brilliant.

We've got some interesting notes here from…you mentioned the Federal Energy Resource Committee [Federal Energy Regulatory Commission] and the chairman there John Wellinghoff, he came out and said in The New York Times that they may not need to build any new coal or nuclear plants in the United States at all because of the significant wind resource and solar resource.

Mark: That was a real eyebrow-raiser. I also read that quote this weekend. That was significant for someone at his level at FERC, as we call it here, to make that kind of statement. From a climate standpoint, let's hope he's right because certainly the United States gets 50% of its energy from coal right now, and electrical generation represents the largest single share of the United States' output of greenhouse gas emissions, and of course we're the larger emitter or close or up to China globally, so it's something we have to be very mindful of before we consider building any new coal plants, but we also have to figure out what to do with all the ones we already have.

Matthew: That followed another administration official, the head of the Department of the Interior, Secretary Salazar, and he came out and I think he was the one actually talking about the offshore wind opportunities, and he was pointing out that the resource is big enough to more than replace all the coal use in the United States.

Mark: What's good about the offshore wind resource in the US is…the best resource is along the east coast. That's not to say it isn't windy offshore at the California coast, it is, but the problem there is that the continental drop-off is very near the shore, so you don't have to go very far offshore before you're in extremely deep water on the west coast and that's problematic for the foundations of these offshore turbines. But the east coast is generally a much more gradual drop-off in terms of depth. And what it means is that that major population belt in the United States, starting from about Boston, travelling down the coast, all the way down to Washington DC and even down to North Carolina, this whole belt where there is a major concentration of people within 20 miles of coastline, instead of having to build billions of dollars across thousands of miles of transmissions lines from the Midwest to get the power here, we can just, at several miles offshore, tap into this abundant wind resource and power these cities.

We also find that offshore wind blows at times when you really need it. Sailors around here…we looked at a sea breeze which is the breeze that tends to kick in in the summertime during the afternoons, which is also when electric demand is at its highest and people are running their air conditioners and the like. We find very strong winds offshore at that time. So projects like Cape Wind can not only provide a lot of clean power from a local inexhaustible source but also one that tends to work well with when electricity is more needed.

Scott: You just mentioned the difference between the west coast and the east coast there and how the sea floor gets quite deep quite quickly along that continental shelf there on the west coast, and therefore the east coast is easier probably to attach the turbines to the sea floor. Can you run us through that whole process for the audience? How do you attach a wind turbine to the sea floor?

Mark: There's different ways of doing it. Looking to the European experience, most of the projects have been in relatively shallow water, under 30 metres. The two primary techniques have been either a mono-pile…most of them have been mono-piles, so if you can imagine a large but hollow steel pipe that gets driven into the seabed, it's typically done in sandy areas, so as it's driven in it fills up with sand and it gets driven down quite deep, up to 30 metres into the sand. And that's what secures the turbine, that's the foundation, and that's what Cape Wind would be using.

Another shallow-water foundation type that's been used especially when there's a more rocky bottom is called a gravity foundation, and essentially it's a poured concrete foundation that sits on the ocean floor. And then as you get into deeper water, there's been a couple of projects in Europe in what they call more of a transition depth, and that ranges from above 30 metres depth but still below 60 metres, in that kind of range, and there you need more of a tripod jacket style foundation where you have three legs driven into the seabed.

In the future, and there's a research and development going on on this now, is what they call deep water, and deep water theoretically could work just fine offshore California or almost any other offshore location irregardless of depth. That concept is where you would have what's called a floating wind turbine that would still be connected to the sea bottom but tethered to the sea bottom by long chains, and that would be adapting technologies that have been used in the offshore oil and gas industries. It's still some years off, we think, but some day that's coming too.

Scott: The actual blades of the wind turbine themselves, how much can they turn to face the wind? What kind of percentage or angle of change are they capable of?

Mark: Yes, modern wind turbines, and this is true of land based turbines as well, they're smart, if you will, and flexible. So they're constantly monitoring the wind speed and wind direction. They are programmed to do this on their own, and that is in the cell which is the boxy-looking structure at the top of the tower that the blades connect into. That can do a full 360-degree rotation. The blades can also feather. They move as there's a shift in the wind to reposition themselves to be able to make the most use of the wind.

Matthew: The capacity factor of the Nantucket site is of interest to us. We note that in Germany and Denmark a lot of wind sites actually have a capacity factor of 25%, so they run on an annual basis about 25% of their possible output. And Australian sites that tend to be utilised have a capacity factor around 30% to 40%, and in New Zealand actually it's rather exceptional where many sites have 50% capacity factor. What sort of capacity factor do you get at Nantucket?

Mark: Our offshore location, we're anticipating 38%.

Matthew: Okay, so in Australian terms that would be considered very high, so that's pretty good.

Mark: Yes, it's very good.

Matthew: And you're saying that it correlates a lot with the more expensive power, the peak demand that you're getting in that location.

Mark: Yes, it correlates well.

Scott: Every time we talk about renewable energy, the naysayers and the reactive people always worry about jobs and stuff like that. Now, can you tell us a little bit about the employment that the wind farm will generate?

Mark: We're going to create hundreds of jobs during the two-year construction process, and then fulltime operational jobs for this project, about 50.

Scott: And in the United States…I'm not sure, does the US actually manufacture any of their components themselves or are they imported?

Mark: The United States is increasing in wind turbine manufacturing, however I think it's fair to say the US continues to depend on a considerable amount of imports from overseas manufacturers to fill our demand. There is enormous potential for American manufacturers to create new plants and create a lot of new jobs, because this is a growing market, both onshore turbines and offshore turbines, and it's a global market, it's a growing market globally. So there's a lot of potential here, but I think it's fair to say globally that the Europeans still dominate this market in terms of manufacturing.

Matthew: We're very interested in the pro-wind campaign on the ground. In fact for many years I've been involved in chasing anti-wind rallies to try and give the voice of the environment and the voice of rational people. Can you tell us a bit about the group of people that have mobilised on the ground in Nantucket and surrounds to actually support…you know, the 'yes' campaign?

Mark: What I've observed here in the United States and it sounds like you've seen in Australia too is that along comes a wind turbine proposal by a company, and then if there's opposition an opposition group will form, as is their right, that's fine, but then there's often what you could almost call…what ends up happening is that there's a silent majority of citizens who actually do support it but maybe don't do very much about that support, maybe don't speak out at the meetings, maybe don't write as many letters to the editor, so it's this opposition group that ends up positioning itself as quote, unquote 'speaking for the community' when in fact they're typically only speaking for a small slice of the community.

Fortunately for Cape Wind, here on Cape Cod and the islands back in 2003 a group of citizens banded together to try to give a voice to that…I wouldn't say a silent majority, but more quiet than the opponents anyway. They called themselves Clean Power Now, their website is cleanpowernow.org and they've done really effective advocacy on the ground for our project. They have really a shoestring budget compared to our opponents, but they have a lot of members and a lot of grassroots strength and they've been able to play a very constructive role.

And I hope for other wind farms around the world, including in Australia, that the citizens can learn from this kind of example and form these kinds of organisations. For credibility purposes they don't take any money from us, we have no financial relationship, but we're sure glad that they're there because a company can only do so much. Those other stakeholders that recognise the importance of more of these kinds of projects getting built need to actively participate as well.

Matthew: On the web we actually saw an advertisement that Greenpeace had funded pretty much highlighting the hypocrisy of Senator Ted Kennedy. Can you tell us a bit about…we get a bit confused in Australia about which Kennedy is which Kennedy and how that sort of eventuated and whether he's come around now or gone silent since Obama’s come out so strongly in favour of renewables.

Mark: Certainly one of the biggest challenges Cape Wind has faced these years and I think a disappointment to a great many people has been that Senator Ted Kennedy…I've lived in Massachusetts my whole life, I voted for him many times and he's much beloved here for many, many reasons, he's had such an incredible career of public service to this country and as a long-standing senator for the state of Massachusetts for many decades and, incidentally, a long-time supporter of renewable energy, yet he has fought our project tooth and nail. And a lot of people have looked at that, including many supporters of his, and said, ‘Gee, if this wasn't in his sailing grounds he'd probably be all for it’.

Scott: You say that there's some exciting news in getting the project up and running, can you tell us about getting approval in the next few weeks or so, you said something about that?

Mark: Yes, we're hoping by the end of June of this year to become the first fully permitted, fully approved offshore wind farm in American waters, and then we'll spend the balance of the year finalising contracts with a wind turbine manufacturer, ocean construction firm, contracting for the sale of our electricity, and securing project finance, which is no small challenge in 2009.

Matthew: Can you tell us, working in renewable energy, are you finding this is a very rewarding job, linking it back to the good that you're doing?

Mark: This is a job I wake up in the morning eager to get started on, I really love it. This is the first job that I've ever had that I really loved. Prior to that I always had to do something on nights or weekends as a volunteer to do something that I really cared about because my day job didn't do that, and it's very nice for me now…especially now that I have two young kids, so I have a lot less free time than I used to have. And incidentally, since I'm speaking to Australians, my two to three-year-old daughter is a huge fan of the Wiggles, so if any of them are listening, a shout-out from the States, keep up the good work.

Matthew: Actually I was on a ferry and…what's that guy's name, the one who's silent, Jeff or something…he was hiding on the ferry and I went up and got a photo with him. So maybe I can send that through.

Mark: He'd have to hide in the US too, they're really big over here.

Matthew: Yeah, yeah. We're trying a bit of an education campaign of wind developers over here. Are you aware of the potential of solar thermal with storage to provide the shoring-up power for when there are troughs and deficits in wind output? So you get your really cheap wind power that's cheaper than anything else, and then you can actually use the dispatchable solar thermal with storage to keep that shored up and therefore we've got a renewable energy solution for all of our power.

Mark: Yes, it's exciting, I know there's a lot of good work going into that field right now. And while battery technology has been maybe something of a disappointment in terms of not having any big breakthroughs…hopefully they'll come but I know there are a lot of other ideas out there, compressed air and other ideas.

Scott: I'd just like to talk to you, Mark, about the…obviously you run education sessions and stuff like that with the community and that's probably helped to educate the movement as to why this thing needs to be built. Can you tell us about those talks that you do with the community?

Mark: Yes, I was hired in January of 2002, and over these past years Cape Wind has given about 500 presentations in the community to a variety of different kinds of stakeholder groups, and everywhere from retired groups to schools to all kinds of civic organisations, business groups, really doing everything we can to help get the word out. We've had our Cape Wind tent and our Cape Wind table up at the county fair on Cape Cod and street festivals. So we've done what we can to make ourselves available, to talk about the project, to answer questions, to clear up misconceptions, some of which have been deliberately planted by project opponents. We've tried to take advantage of any opportunity like that that's come along.

Matthew: What's the population of the area? And is there anything else you might want to share that we might have missed?

Mark: The population of Cape Cod, year round, is about a quarter of a million, and it can almost triple in the summertime, so the summertime is the really busy time, and I forget the exact…I mean, the populations of the islands are quite a lot smaller but I don't remember what the exact numbers are. It's a beautiful place. Some of your listeners have been here on vacation before. I recommend others, if you're thinking about a vacation to the States at some point in future years, to consider Massachusetts and Boston and Cape Cod and the islands, and if it's sometime more than a few years from now you'll also be able to take the boat tour of Cape Wind, America's first offshore wind farm and I look forward to seeing you.

Matthew: Fantastic.

Scott: Mark, we'd just like to thank you very much for talking with us this morning (or this afternoon for you), and we hopefully haven't kept you away from your two young children…

Matthew:…and the Wiggles.

Scott:…and we're very much looking forward to hearing by the end of June this year about the Cape Wind wind farm being the first fully permitted US wind farm, and by the end of the year to really see some wonderful progress happening there.

Mark: Fabulous. Thanks so much for having me on.

Scott: Thank you.

We've been speaking to Mark Rodgers, communications director for Cape Wind. Cape Wind is a project that's proposing America's first offshore wind farm located on Horseshoe Shoal in Nantucket Sound in Massachusetts. And you can learn more about Cape Wind, you can visit them at capewind.org

Beyond Zero Emissions website is available for you to look at, it's beyondzeroemissions.org, so check out this interview and all manner of other interviews…

Matt: at beyondzeroemissions.org

Transcript by Julie Burleigh