Energy securityAssembling Offshore Wind Turbines

The United States offshore wind energy industry is growing, with planned commitments to build 26 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind projects along the East Coast from now through 2035. This is the clean power equivalent of 26 nuclear power plants, or roughly 10 times the average electric energy used by the entire state of Delaware.

Marshalling ports, large waterside sites with the acreage and weight-carrying capacity necessary to assemble, house and deploy the huge wind turbines ready to ship out into the ocean, will be critical to meeting this current and committed demand for offshore wind.

Yet few viable port sites exist along the East Coast that have clear overhead access from port to sea to transport these large turbines — each larger than the Statue of Liberty — and channels deep enough to accommodate the vessels that carry them. Those that do are small in area and will not be able to fully support the existing demand for turbine deployment.  Nor will they be able to efficiently deploy turbines that are ever-increasing in size, as the industry starts to look beyond the 8 megawatt (MW) turbine to 12 and 15 MW.

A team of University of Delaware undergraduate students, advised by UD Professor Willett Kempton and energy policy analyst and doctoral candidate Sara Parkison, recently released a report identifying two ideal locations for a marshalling port in the Delaware Bay. The proposed locations include a Delaware site situated north of Delaware City near the Occidental Chemical Corporation, and a location on land transferred from the Army Corps of Engineers around Salem, New Jersey.

Delaware says that the UD students, most of whom graduated in May 2020, worked together for over a year to evaluate the viability and logistics of developing marshalling ports in the Delaware Bay to service the offshore wind sector, as part of the Office of Economic Innovation and Partnership’s Spin In program.

According to the UD report, both sites have the potential to service offshore wind projects as far north as Connecticut and as far south as the Carolinas, shoring up a critical link in the offshore wind production capability. Each location is large enough to build a port capable of deploying over 500 MW of clean energy annually, with ample potential to expand.