Representatives of the Governor's Energy Office took questions from a legislative committee Wednesday about the scale of offshore wind projects that might be sited in the Gulf of Maine, and their potential impacts on whales, fisheries, and aesthetics.
Celina Cunningham of the Governor's Energy Office says a network of floating wind turbines 20 miles offshore would require miles of cable buried 6 feet under the ocean floor. Cunningham expects that wind projects would eventually be interconnected with those elsewhere in New England.
"When you're thinking about the type of buildout that we're going to have on the east coast, it's more effective to have coordinated transmission where you have a backbone and then multiple projects are interconnecting, and they would go ashore through a substation," she says.
Cunningham says such an offshore grid would be developed in coordination with other New England states and ISO New England, which operates the regional electrical grid. She also made it clear that any commercial offshore wind development is still years away.
