$20 Million Wind Blade Testing Facility Headed for Charlestown

By Michael P. Norton
and Jim O’Sullivan
STATE HOUSE NEWS SERVICE

STATE HOUSE, BOSTON, JUNE 25, 2007…..Massachusetts will be one of two states to host a state-of-the-art, federal wind turbine blade testing facility, where technicians will test 230-foot blades allowing for deepwater wind power generation, US Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said Monday.

The federal government is contributing $2 million of the estimated overall $20 million cost for the Charlestown facility, with over $18 million in financing coming from the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, the state’s sector-specific development agency.

“I think this facility will be part of a renaissance,” Bodman said, calling the Charlestown and Ingleside, Texas plants examples of “projects that will have a big impact on our national energy security as well as the health of our environment.”

Patrick aides said the facility would create only eight technician jobs at first, but would likely draw designers and manufacturers to the area. They said the Mass. Technology Collaborative will write a $7 million grant for capital costs, float $5 million in loans for additional capital costs, another $1.2 million as a working capital loan, and establish a $5 million research fund.

Also on Monday, Gov. Deval Patrick rolled out a plan, agreed to late last week by legislative leaders, to address power consumption through conservation rather than new generation, freezing energy demand increases by 2010.

Noting the cost of efficiency on a kilowatt basis is one-third as expensive as new generation, assistant energy and environment secretary Robert Keough said fuel expenses are at the root of the state’s high-energy costs and said the best way to address the issue is to reduce energy consumption and become more efficient about the way energy is drained.

“We think this is the single biggest thing we can do to control energy costs in this region,” Patrick said.

Demand for electricity grows by about 1 percent a year and the plan’s goal is to reduce that to zero, not by restraining economic growth, but by meeting growth with conservation and efficiency efforts, Keough said. The administration’s plan will be executed through legislation and ongoing administration efforts to remove disincentives to conservation and efficiency from the rate structure, he said.

US Reps. William Delahunt and Martin Meehan both attended the press conference, the outgoing Meehan, set to take over as chancellor of UMass-Lowell next week, declining to speak at the event. Delahunt, who opposes an effort to site a wind farm in Nantucket Sound, called turbine technology development essential to wind generation prospects.

“This particular facility is going to provide opportunities to go further and further from our shoreline, and to produce the kind of energy that is going to make Massachusetts the capital, if you will, of renewable energy in this country,” said Delahunt, pointing out that Massachusetts is widely known “as the Saudi Arabia of wind.”

Both the Bay State and Texas sites are situated near water, a necessity for such facilities, Bodman said, because the blades are so long they need to be transported by barge.

Bodman declined to offer an opinion on the Cape Wind project, which has drawn support from Patrick but vociferous opposition from both Delahunt and Sen. Edward Kennedy, the powerful chieftain of the state’s Washington delegation.

The Patrick conservation plan follows up on other “green” initiatives that have pleased environmental activists in the first six months of the administration. At the press conference with Bodman Monday morning, Patrick said, “We believe if we do this on a Commonwealth-wide basis, then the need for peak generation power plants would be obviated.”

Energy and Environmental Affairs Secretary Ian Bowles, charged by Patrick with developing the consumption reduction plan by Sept. 1 of this year, called the 2010 deadline “an achievable goal.”

An omnibus energy bill sponsored by House Speaker Salvatore DiMasi “certainly covers this terrain,” Keough said, and the administration’s ideas could be rolled into that legislation, which remains under construction.

The policy plan was announced in The Boston Globe and Keough said providing an outline of the proposal exclusively to the newspaper “seemed to us to be the best way to roll out this initiative.”  Keough said the communications strategy allowed the administration to work with a reporter who “specializes in this” and the chance for a front-page story was “certainly a big part of it.”

Patrick did not directly answer two reporters' questions about any tie between the policy and a political fundraiser he attended last week co-hosted by an NStar executive. After avoiding the first question, Patrick looked surprised while starting to answer a follow-up question when he was interrupted by Sen. Michael Morrissey, Senate chair of the Committee on Telecommunications, Energy and Utilities.

While Patrick and others on the podium looked on with evident surprise, the Quincy Democrat interjected that the ideas put forth by the administration "are not new ideas. Well, they are new because we finally have an administration that’s talking about energy. So, I guess it would probably be easier for the last administration to go to a fundraiser because they’ve never had anything to say about energy … I think to suggest that there’s anything else more than that, other than good policy, would be mistaken.”

“What he said,” Patrick joked.

Bowles said the Charlestown testing plant would be a “horizontal facility.” Owned by Massport, the property is currently operated by Diversified Automotive, Patrick aides said.