Posted on June 6, 2025
The developer extends its New Bedford lease to next June, with dozens of barge trips to the unfinished offshore wind farm still ahead.
NEW BEDFORD — More than two dozen wind turbine blades sit in stacks at the Marine Commerce Terminal, awaiting their turn to enter the slow-moving assembly line that starts with a barge and ends with a crane-equipped ship installing them 15 miles offshore.
Vineyard Wind was supposed to be completed in 2024. But according to a recently renewed lease with a state agency, Vineyard Wind has secured use of the staging terminal in New Bedford through mid-2026, suggesting construction may continue past this year.
Vineyard Wind’s parent company, Iberdrola, however, said earlier this year that the developer expects to finish construction by the end of 2025. Last month, four turbines — out of a planned 62 — were sending power to the Massachusetts grid.
As of this month, the barges that carry turbine parts from New Bedford to the wind farm — three blades, two tower pieces and one house-sized generator at a time — will need to complete at least 25 more trips to complete construction. And that’s not counting possible additional vessel trips to remove potentially faulty blades.
Work at the terminal has continued, as it should: the Trump administration’s order targeting and freezing offshore wind projects, generally, doesn’t stop projects already under construction.
But Vineyard Wind’s installation has continued slowly, with an additional required step of replacing already installed blades from the same factory as the blade that broke last July. It has also continued quietly, since the offshore wind industry has become a key target of the administration. Vineyard Wind declined to comment for this story. Late last month, the project’s map for mariners, once updated quite regularly, was re-issued in redacted form. Icons of towers and blades have been replaced with uniform black dots, making tracking project progress even more difficult.
So where does Vineyard Wind stand?
As of April 14, before its map went dark, Vineyard Wind had installed more than half of its 62 turbine towers. Of those, 23 had blades on them. However, it’s not clear how many blades are from France, which means that the turbine is completed, and how many are from the troubled Canadian blade factory (which means they must be removed and replaced, under a federal order issued Jan. 17).
Vineyard Wind’s maps also suggest the developer in April removed the remaining nub left over after a blade snapped last July. (One version of its map showed a full turbine at the broken turbine, AW38, and the subsequent version showed the icon with only a tower and generator.)
This week, the Sea Installer, a specialized, few-of-its-kind, jack-up installation vessel, was back at turbine AW38, suggesting it could be installing replacement blades. Vineyard Wind didn’t answer questions about it.
In September 2023 — 21 months ago — Vineyard Wind shipped out and installed the first of its 62 planned turbines.
The Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, which owns and operates the staging terminal in New Bedford, said Vineyard Wind on April 29 extended its lease through June 2026. (Vineyard Wind’s initial lease expired at the end of 2024, and a recent extension expired on March 31, 2025.)
The Light asked Vineyard Wind why it had extended its lease well into 2026, when an Iberdrola official previously said construction would be finished this year. Spokespersons did not respond to questions and declined comment.
Previous extensions were three-month increments. A MassCEC spokesperson said by email that this lease extension is longer because the agreement allows early termination if sought, but declined to provide further details.
From January to April, the terminal was not very active, with only a handful of barge shipments to the site, according to alerts from the Port Authority and harbor cam photos posted by West Island Weather Station. Barge transits picked back up in May, with six trips out to the site through this week with either a full turbine set (blades, tower and generator) or blades only.
The Sea Installer has been active throughout the lease since mid-May after spending time sitting off Salem. This week, vessel trackers showed it spending time near at least two turbines marked as active work zones, suggesting turbine installation or blade removal is happening at those sites.
Joel Stocker, a retired teacher and GIS-enthusiast based in Connecticut, has been building his own progress map of the site with the help of satellite tracking.
Based on Stocker’s map, about 34 turbines are at various stages of installation — some need the blades replaced, while some don’t have blades yet. Conversely, 28 circles on his map mark areas that have transition pieces only — meaning no turbine towers have been installed there. He marked eight of those 34 turbines as fully installed.
He told The Light he infers offshore installation activities by following vessel tracking data (he has memorized the functions of project vessels) and confirms those inferences every few days — as long as the skies are clear — with satellite imagery.
He’s also been tracking other projects, including Orsted’s, and says Revolution Wind, a project south of Rhode Island, seems to be progressing a bit more quickly and consistently.
According to Orsted’s most recent quarterly earnings update, released in April, approximately half of Revolution Wind’s 65 turbines had been installed, and the project is on track to be completed in 2026. The project’s first turbine was installed in September.
As of Iberdrola’s April 30 report to investors, four of Vineyard Wind’s turbines were sending power to the Massachusetts grid. The four turbines amount to 52 megawatts, or about enough energy to power 26,000 Massachusetts homes.
ISO New England, which operates the region’s transmission grid, lists renewables as providing 17% of the grid’s electricity supply. Of that, wind power (which includes onshore sources), accounts for 57%.
Vineyard Wind pushes on
Vineyard Wind has created about 2,000 jobs and more than 200 contracts with suppliers and businesses across 29 states, and yielded about $2 billion in investment in the country, according to a court filing in a lawsuit against the Trump administration and its freezing of offshore wind permitting and leasing.
Attorneys general from 18 blue states are arguing in their lawsuit that offshore wind promotes economic activity and significant investment across the country.
To date, Vineyard Wind has survived several legal challenges coming from the fishing industry and groups opposing offshore wind development. The groups lost their court cases challenging the federal government’s approval of the project, and last month, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected their petitions.
But Vineyard Wind, like many other offshore wind projects, still faces challenges, with opposition groups emboldened and increasingly active during the second Trump administration. Nantucket-based activist group ACK for Whales filed petitions with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and BOEM, requesting the agencies rescind approvals and permits for Vineyard Wind.
Another group, Green Oceans, last month commissioned a report that lays out an action plan for Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to cancel projects in New England, including Vineyard Wind.
Still, experts believe Vineyard Wind is largely safe, despite what happened with Empire Wind: the federal government took the unprecedented step in April of halting a fully permitted, under construction project, only to reverse course a month later and allow construction to continue.
Timothy Fox, an analyst at ClearView Energy Partners, said last month that the firm believes Burgum could take a “bifurcated approach.” Fox thinks the projects in advanced stages of development will move forward (meaning Vineyard Wind will complete construction), while those in earlier stages will remain stagnant under the Jan. 20 presidential memorandum — which state attorneys general on Thursday will argue must be immediately lifted.
Massachusetts is counting on offshore wind to meet projected grid demand and its climate goals of achieving net-zero emissions (meaning the state offsets or removes as much carbon as it emits) by 2050. The state has three offshore wind projects in various stages of development: Vineyard Wind 1, SouthCoast Wind and New England Wind. Together, they would produce 3.1 gigawatts of energy, or enough to power up to 1.4 million homes.
