Governors' Wind Energy Coalition

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• The Providence Journal/Sandor BodoWorkers at Specialty Diving Services, the facility in Quonset Business Park where pieces of the foundations are being fabricated, attend Monday’s ceremony to mark the start of local construction on the wind farm project off Block Island.

NORTH KINGSTOWN, R.I. — Seven years after first proposing to develop wind power in the waters off Rhode Island, Deepwater Wind on Monday marked the start of local construction on its five-turbine Block Island test project, which will become the first offshore wind farm in the nation.

CEO Jeffrey Grybowski and other representatives of the the Providence-based firm were joined by Governor Raimondo, Rhode Island’s congressional delegation and state business and labor leaders at a celebration at the marine construction firm in the Quonset Business Park that is fabricating pieces of the turbine’s steel foundations.

With some of the ladders, platforms and railings already made by Quonset-based Specialty Diving Services visible inside a warehouse behind her, Raimondo said the state has an opportunity to position itself as a leader in offshore renewable energy.

“Not only are we going to create jobs,” she said, “but we’re going to rebrand ourselves as being more innovative and, over time, make Rhode Island a place that has lower energy costs, more diversified energy supply and greener energy.”

The 30-megawatt Block Island Wind Farm will supply only a small fraction of the state’s energy needs and the price of power will be much higher than what utilities currently pay for electricity generated by burning fossil fuels. But Deepwater has a second, larger project in the works that Grybowski says would charge much lower rates as construction costs come down and a U.S. supply chain for offshore wind energy is built up.

Although there are thousands of offshore wind turbines in northern Europe and hundreds more off China and Japan, there are none in the United States. Speaker after speaker at the ceremony said that the aim is for the Block Island Wind Farm to be the first of many offshore wind projects off the Atlantic Coast.

And the hope then is that Rhode Island can become the hub for an industry that in Europe, according to Grybowski, employs 60,000 people.

“Right now, the only people working in that industry in the U.S. are standing behind you,” he said.

That’s only a slight exaggeration. Although the main pieces of the latticework foundations are being built in Louisiana by a company with long experience in the Gulf of Mexico’s offshore oil and gas industry, Specialty Diving Services is the only other company in the U.S. involved so far in the construction process. The 29-year-old business founded by Nicholas Tanionos and Ronald Archambault will take part in other stages of construction as it learns the ins and outs of offshore wind construction.

“Because we don’t do a lot of heavy industry in Rhode Island anymore, it’s been really important to take good Rhode Island companies like SDS and partner them with global world-class companies, which is what we’re doing, because we need to learn how to do this in the U.S.,” said Grybowski. “It’s going to take time, but starting with small projects like Block Island is critically important.”

SDS won’t be the only local business hired by Deepwater. In all, over the year-and-a-half long construction process, the Block Island Wind Farm will create some 330 jobs, said Grybowski. Workers will be hired to install the foundations for the turbines, lay the submarine cable that will connect the wind farm to the mainland, carry out onshore utility work and plan and oversee the first-of-its-kind project.

If all goes as planned, the turbines off Block Island will start spinning in the fall of 2016.

“This is the start of something big,” said Michael Sabitoni, president of the Rhode Island Building and Construction Trades Council.