One look at the huge ship (612 feet long) and you knew it was something special. It was backed up to the middle bridge of the Piscataqua River and loomed over the roadway. How to handle the ship and its cargo is a project. The Port Director at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, considered the project as a new opportunity, and we considered it as spawned from a Green by Definition (GbD) project. First a little about the GbD project. Granite Reliable Power Park is a wind farm project in northern New Hampshire. It consists of 33 Vesta V90 3 Mw wind turbines, only the second U.S. wind project to deploy these turbines. It will generate 330,000 MWH, enough to power 40,000 homes and offset 332 million pounds of carbon dioxide. In addition, the project will generate more that 200 jobs.
The port project itself; offload the cargo to be used for the wind farm from the Salmaagracht, a Swedish registered massive vessel docked at the State Pier in Portsmouth. The cargo:
- 22 nacelles (gear housing) measuring 32 feet long and weighing 81 tons each, about the weight of two humpback whales.
- 69 fixed blades, each measuring 149 feet long or about the length of 4 school buses and weighing 17 tons.
- 22 hubs (part of the rotor assembly) and 22 spinners
What makes the ship special are the 3 huge cranes that can lift up to 120 tons. Further logistics for the project included one tractor trailer for each blade, 80 workers, and 45 minutes to unload each blade. It was a pretty amazing project that had never been done before in Portsmouth Harbor, unique, one time effort, consumes limited resources, has a fixed start and end date, you know, a project. What we didn’t see is the greenality of the port project itself. Yes, it was related to a GbD project, and we bet that by now, you know the questions to ask to evaluate the greenality of the project itself. So here is the challenge. Tell us the questions you might ask by commenting on the post. We’ll start you out with one. What kind of lighting do they have at the State Pier?
Wind Power Super Highway
The project is dubbed the Atlantic Wind Connection and is intended to provide the transmission lines for a series of offshore wind turbines capable of supplying 1.9 million homes without taxing the already overburdened electric grid. It is very ambitious project covering an area of 350 miles with on-shore transmission nodes in Norfolk, VA, Lewes, DE, the proximity of Manasquan, NJ, and Newark, NJ. The article goes on to say that the water remains relatively shallow 10-15 miles offshore, far enough so as not to be seen from shore, one of the issue plaguing the Cape Wind Project.
How exciting to be a project manager on that project. One of the risks would certainly be that since it is the North Atlantic, there is always that possibility of the “prefect storm”. The timeline for the project looks like a deliverable in 2013 of construction start, complete in 2020, but with an interim milestone of the initial stage of construction complete in 2016.
Interestingly, Ken Salazar, Interior Secretary, said last month “Rather than develop transmission infrastructure on a piecemeal basic, we should – in close coordination with the private sector, states, and tribes – lay out smart transmission systems upfront.” Gee, a strategy for a change (sorry-editorial comment).
Anyway, we’ll keep an eye on this project and this is just another reason for PMs to be “surfing the green wave“.