John Giovannitti, standing outside the gates of the Paulsboro Marine Terminal near more than a dozen 400-foot-long steel pipes that weighed up to 5 million pounds each, fielded calls about fixing a roadway and that night’s city council meeting.
On a very blustery day in March, however, the Borough of Paulsboro’s new mayor wanted to talk about the wind. The same wind New Jersey hopes to one day harness into clean energy for hundreds of thousands of homes and provide jobs in the process. “We feel that this port has so much anticipation and a lot of people have put a lot of time and effort to make a site that was basically dead to where we are today,” said Giovannitti.
“The projects announced by Board of Public Utilities earlier this year show New Jersey’s continued support for offshore wind development,” Tim Sullivan, chief executive officer of the New Jersey Economic Development Authority, told NJ Advance Media, “and is a major investment in our clean energy future that will expand our leadership role in the growing industry.”
If both the Salem County and Paulsboro wind ports work as envisioned, it could solve many of the issues that halted Ørsted’s plans, according to Mark Magyar, director of the Sweeney Center at Rowan University.
Those developers — Attentive Energy (a subsidiary of TotalEnergies) and Leading Light Wind (from Invenergy and energyRE) — also committed to obtaining their monopiles from Paulsboro and assembling plus shipping out their infrastructure in Salem County as well.
Atlantic Shores is currently moving ahead with its 157-wind turbine development.
Dennis Culnan, of the South Jersey Port Corporation, said when the Paulsboro port gears up again, plans from EEW call for the construction of two more buildings: one to paint and blast the monopiles and a second to fabricate and roll the steel into monopile segments.