After years of starts and stops, workers installed the final blades on the last turbine Friday evening to complete Vineyard Wind, the country’s first large-scale offshore wind project.
It will be at least several weeks until all 62 turbines in the wind farm off the coast of Massachusetts are fully up and running, generating power for the New England grid. Still, the end of construction is a milestone for the project and the U.S. offshore wind industry, which has faced years of economic and political headwinds.
Gov. Maura Healey said she was “thrilled” to learn construction was complete, noting that the project is expected to save Massachusetts ratepayers $1.4 billion over the first 20 years of operation.
“The affordable, homegrown power it delivers to Massachusetts residents and businesses will bring costs down as President Trump throws global markets into disarray,” she said in a statement.
As the first large offshore wind project to go through the cumbersome federal permitting process, all eyes have been on Vineyard Wind from the beginning. Whether it would reach this point was not a sure bet.
Construction has been pushed back several times, beginning in 2019 under the first Trump administration. In 2024 a turbine blade snapped and debris washed up on the shores of Nantucket, causing months of delay. And just three months ago, when the project was 95% complete, the U.S. Interior Department issued a stop-work order.
But with a stretch of good weather offshore, the developers behind the $4.5 billion project managed to get over the finish line.
The next step is what’s called commissioning — the complicated process of connecting turbines to the grid and ensuring they work properly. In an earnings call earlier this week, Iberdrola, the parent company of Avangrid, one of the project’s co-developers, told investors that 52 of the 62 turbines are authorized for operation.
A spokesperson for Vineyard Wind declined to say exactly how many turbines are generating power, but in late January, the company said in court documents that 44 turbines were operational. When fully online, the wind farm will be capable of producing 800 megawatts, enough electricity to power about 400,000 homes in the region.
As Vineyard Wind finished construction Friday evening, the wind developer Ørsted announced that some of its turbines in the Revolution Wind project near Rhode Island were sending power to the grid for the first time. That project is nearly complete as well, and will eventually be capable of powering up to 350,000 homes.
While wind power often comes under fire from critics for being intermittent — the wind doesn’t always blow, they point out — advocates of the renewable technology point out that it tends to work best on cold winter days, which is also when the New England grid is most strained.
During the recent stretch of frigid weather in January and February, for example, industry experts observed that Vineyard Wind and South Fork Wind, a 12-turbine project that’s been fully operational since 2024, performed as well as an average natural gas power plant.
Offshore wind has also provided an important economic boost to several coastal cities in the Northeast. New Bedford mayor Jon Mitchell celebrated the end of Vineyard Wind’s construction phase, saying it “represents the closing argument of the case we have been making for years: that New Bedford is well-suited to be a center of the offshore wind industry.”
New Bedford is home to the Marine Commerce Terminal, a $150 million specialized staging port for offshore wind. All of the massive turbine components for Vineyard Wind were stored and partially assembled there before being loaded on boats and sent to sea. The project has employed about 3,500 people, many of whom are union workers.
When the next offshore wind projects will be ready to start construction, however, remains an open question. During President Trump’s second term, all but a handful of wind farms have been put on pause indefinitely.
Those that have been able to proceed — five that were already under construction, plus the South Fork Wind project — have had a tough go of it. President Trump vowed on the campaign trail to end the offshore wind industry, and his administration has issued several stop work orders. The latest, a blanket construction freeze, claimed that offshore wind projects posed a substantial threat to national security.
The wind developers successfully sued the federal government and were able to resume construction, though the government could still file an appeal in some cases.
Still, while the future for the industry is uncertain, offshore wind boosters like state Senator Michael Barrett, one of the key architects of Massachusetts’ clean energy targets, remain optimistic about the industry’s long-term prospects.
“Time’s passing. Trump’s gone in under three years and the winds around here have staying power,” he wrote in an email. “The industry will come back if we’re smart about it and set the stage.”
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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