- General Electric wind turbine blades already being imported through the Port of Wilmington.
The type of wind turbine that NRG Bluewater seeks to build off the Delaware coast contains about 8,000 components. Who will supply them?
Company president Peter Mandelstam says the goal is to bring the supply chain along with the windfarm, not merely to import foreign-made components.
“We came into the state in 2006 and we immediately sat down with all of the unions, said we were going to do a full union job, wanted to talk about local content, local jobs, good, well-paying jobs,” Mandelstam said. “And we’ve continued that dialogue.”
He notes that NRG Bluewater Wind is funding an offshore wind technology training program at Delaware Technical and Community College. “We’re committed to training the workforce who will work on these projects and hiring local folks wherever feasible.”
Although the state recently lost out on a multimillion dollar grant to develop a facility at the Port of Wilmington to build and ship wind turbine parts, officials say that’s not a major setback to establishing a windpower supply chain here.
“We think there’s a real potential for manufacturing activity,” said Senator Tom Carper. “We’re not giving up on this.”
Encouraging investors is an important step as the recession economy slowly recovers.
“What we want to do is bring some ‘first movers’ to Delaware, to put factories in actually in advance of the first project going live,” Mandelstam said. “That will be a challenge, but we’re committed to trying to work with the supply chain and seeing if some of them will get the ‘first mover’ advantage and put a factory in Delaware.”
U.S. Representative-elect John Carney says the biggest positive impact for Delaware would come if the state can attract a turbine manufacturer here, as well as producing the steel for the towers—possibly at the Evraz Steel Plant in Claymont.
Carney discusses the effort to bring “first movers” to Delaware:
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“It’s one thing to have the first windfarm off the Delaware coast,” Rep.-elect Carney said. “It’s another thing to build those and provide jobs for Delawareans to build that supply chain.” Before running for the House, Carney was president and chief operating officer of Transformative Technologies LLC. Its subsidiary, DelaWind, was formed to build towers for Bluewater Wind and other windpower projects.
Carney and other Delaware officials support extending energy manufacturing tax credits that could be used to retrofit and convert local plants for windpower-related purposes. He cited Steel Suppliers and Erectors on the Christina River in Wilmington as an example of a local company interested in being a part of the venture.
But local firms need assurances that the windfarm will be built and contracts for local manufacturers will be available.
“That’s really the key,” Carney said. “You can’t pay back your loans and your investors without getting the contracts, and that’s going to be based on the ability to deliver.”
Carney explains why being first in the windpower race matters:
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Collin O’Mara, secretary of the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control, said windpower has the capacity to generate thousands of jobs, from research and development to creating prototypes, manufacturing components, installation, and maintenance.
“What we’re trying to figure out is making sure we have a critical mass of projects that justify having some of these suppliers locate facilities in this state, to supply locally—making sure it’s cheaper to have them manufactured here, with American labor, with Delawareans working,” O’Mara said. He noted that the wind industry may not want to go overseas and thousands of miles away for cheap labor, because of the high costs of shipping and the sheer size of some of the parts.
Yet global competition looms. A New York Times story on Wednesday noted that Chinese companies, with loans, land, and preferential treatment from the government, now control nearly half of the $45 billion wind turbine market.
At the University of Delaware conference “Creating the Clean Energy Economy” this week, experts agreed that states cannot yet look to the federal government to provide major support for windpower—or even to do a major overhaul of outdated regulations that hamper the industry’s growth.
“The absence of a national policy and the absence of national standards is a real challenge,” noted attorney Robert Whetzel of Richards Layton & Finger.
“A lot of the progress is being made at the state level, not so much at the federal level,” said state Representative Dennis E. Williams (D-Talleyville).
Congress was expected to vote Wednesday on extending renewable energy manufacturing cash grants, which expire this month, that are crucial to keeping the windpower industry in this country, officials agreed. Mandelstam hopes the grant program will be extended through 2016.
Letting the incentives expire would be a mistake, said Sen. Carper.
“We have to provide what you’d call a nurturing environment for those activities,” he said. “It invites the manufacturers to come and set up shop in Delaware or on the Delmarva peninsula.
Senator Carper on the importance of continuing incentives for wind power (Click here to listen)
“If we’re not very smart, what we’ll see five, six, or seven years from now is windmills generating electricity up and down the East Coast, and all of the components—the windmills, the turbines, the transmission lines—they’ll all be manufactured overseas.
“That would be very foolish.”
