The First US Cable Boat for Offshore Wind Starts Work in Trump’s Shadow

The Marmac 306 in the New York Harbor near Brooklyn, New York. Photo by Bryan Derballa /Photographer: Bryan Derballa/Blo

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(Bloomberg) — The first US-flagged boat that can bury the undersea cables to connect offshore wind turbines to the power grid on land has started work within view of the Statue of Liberty and the New York City skyline.

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The Marmac 306, a 300-foot (91-meter) barge built in Louisiana by Norwegian cable company Nexans SA and operated by US maritime company Crowley Maritime Corp., started work this month. It’s digging a trench for the cables that will transmit the electricity generated by Equinor ASA’s $5 billion Empire Wind 1 project all the way to the Brooklyn power grid. 

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The fact that the Marmac 306 was built domestically means that it can transport cables within the US and bury near-shore cable where that would be illegal for a foreign vessel. The barge is exactly the kind of ship the US needs to build its capacity to power coastal cities without warming the climate. 

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But by the time it arrived in New York Harbor, the odds of the US doing that in the near term had crashed. 

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In recent years, offshore wind developers have faced soaring costs due to Covid-19-caused disruptions and rising interest rates, forcing project cancellations and billions of dollars in write-downs. Then President Donald Trump, who hates offshore wind, returned to the White House and said he didn’t want to see any turbines installed while he was in office. He even halted work on Empire Wind for several weeks this spring, before letting work resume upon reaching a deal with New York’s governor.

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Trump’s new tax law also speeds up the phaseout of tax credits the sector has relied on. Since Trump’s re-election, BloombergNEF’s forecast for new offshore wind developments has fallen by 56%. 

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The ship nevertheless represents a milestone for US clean energy, developers say, as work grinds along on the first offshore wind farm that will connect directly to the Big Apple. 

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“This cable will provide power to over 500,000 homes, so it’s a huge step in renewable energy,” said Catherine Teige, a marine project engineer at Nexans who runs the day-to-day work of burying the cable. Speaking via Zoom from one of the shipping containers that serves as an office aboard the boat, she said, “A lot of tourists come to see this view, when I’m just going to work.”

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Assembly of the vessel involved taking a standard Marmac barge — SpaceX reportedly uses the same type to retrieve its rockets from the ocean — and attaching the cranes, vertical injector, winches and all the other necessary equipment. “It went from a flat-deck barge to this construction barge in a little over a year,” said Teige, who oversaw that work in Louisiana.

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The Marmac 306 is currently excavating the trench where it will later lay the cable. The vertical injector, a massive piece of machinery that looks a bit like a metal hockey stick, hangs from the side of the boat down below the waves where it shoots jets of water into the seabed to blast out a 15-foot-deep ditch. The boat travels slower than a toddler walks, and so far its top speed when it’s trenching is just 20 feet a minute.