BPU picks offshore wind farm builder
The new Jersey Board of Public Utilities today chose the firm Garden State Offshore Energy to build New Jersey’s first offshore wind farm.
The five members of the BPU voted unanimously to accept an evaluation committee’s recommendation to award a $4 million wind energy grant to the firm, a joint venture between PSEG Renewable Energy, a subsidiary of Public Service Enterprise Group of Newark, and Deepwater Wind of Hoboken.
“People in New Jersey are ready for this, they support it and they understand what’s going on in the environment,” said Jeanne Fox, president of the BPU, which made the selection at today’s meeting.
The firm has proposed building a 96-turbine, 347-megawatt wind farm some 16 to 20 miles off the coast of Avalon in Atlantic County. One megawatt is enough to power about 800 homes.
The project will cost an estimated $1 billion. Officials envision it as the first installment of a plan to develop hundreds of turbines off the Jersey coast to produce clean energy from wind and help reduce greenhouse gases contributing to global warming.
The state’s draft energy master plan calls for developing 1,000 megawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2020, enough to power nearly a million homes.
The evaluation committee chose the PSEG/Deepwater project over four other proposals as the one “most beneficial to the state.”
By Rudy Larini
The Star-Ledger
3 October 2008
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Tags: Wind power, Wind energy
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