Philly Shipyard becomes a player in offshore wind, boosted by an old, obscure federal law

Few realized until President Joe Biden’s visit to the city Thursday that the Philly Shipyard could become a player in the offshore wind industry emerging off the Eastern seaboard.

The shipyard signed a contract as far back as 2021 to build the Acadia, a 461-foot-long, highly specialized vessel that’s needed to get the skyscraper-high turbines set in the seafloor.

A key boost for the shipyard: An old federal law, the Jones Act, likely unknown to most outside the maritime industry, requires that vessels transporting cargo within the United States be built in the U.S. instead of overseas.

The Acadia is being constructed at the Philly Shipyard for the Houston-based Great Lakes Dredge & Dock Corp., the country’s largest dredging operation, which has jumped into the offshore wind business.

At least initially, the ship would be used for the Empire Offshore Wind project, a joint venture between Equinor and BP for wind farms approved off the coast of New York.

Biden announced Thursday during a steel-cutting ceremony for the ship that it would be the first offshore wind vessel of its kind to be made in the United States.

The vessel would be built by the pool of 1,400 workers and nine unions based at the shipyard, according to Matthew Cassidy, a spokesperson for the shipyard. The ship’s steel plates will be made by United Steelworkers in Indiana.

Biden said the activity surrounding the ship would generate an estimated $125 million a year as it is being built.

The ship is expected to be complete for delivery in 2025, according to the Philly Shipyard’s second quarter report, and is about 6% complete.

The vessel would be used as part of subsea rock installation work for the Empire Wind I and II wind farms to be built off the coast of New York, according to Great Lakes Dredge & Dock company literature. The two wind farms would have the capacity to provide power to more than one million homes in New York.

The rock installation will be used to protect and stabilize monopile foundations, electrical substructures, and export cables by the mid-2020s, Great Lakes Dredge & Dock said.

The company will be working with Dutch-owned Van Oord, a “global market leader in subsea rock installation.”

Philly Shipyard announced in November 2021 that the ship would be built in South Philadelphia. The shipyard also said there is the possibility of Great Lakes Dredge & Dock contracting a second ship at the location.

The initial value of the contract was $197 million, and $382 million if both ships were built.

However, the Business Network for Offshore Wind, a nonprofit, educational organization that advocates for offshore wind, reported in a news release Thursday that Great Lake Dredge & Dock was investing $246 million into the Acadia.

Ulstein, a Norwegian/Dutch company, designed the Acadia. The vessel will be able to carry up to 20,000 metric tons of rock, which it will transport and deposit on the ocean bottom, laying a foundation for the monopiles — the foundations for offshore wind turbines.

The ship is expected to have accommodations for 45 people.

Great Lake Dredge & Dock says the vessel will boast “state-of-the-art technology, equipment, environmental controls, and automation, and will be built “with best-in-class safety, environmental, and emissions standards.”

It is capable of using biofuel and can be powered by electricity while in port.

There are no indications the Acadia would be used by either of the companies, Ørsted and Atlantic Shores, with approval to build the first wind farms in New Jersey toward Gov. Phil Murphy’s ambitious goal of producing 11,000 megawatts of energy from offshore wind by 2040.

New Jersey’s first wind farm, Ocean Wind I, being built by Ørsted, is planned to be 13 nautical miles southeast of Atlantic City and have an estimated capacity of 1,100 megawatts capable of powering over 380,000 homes.

The plan calls for 98 wind turbines with construction set to begin this year and first powered delivery in late 2024 or early 2025.

» READ MORE: At 3 million pounds, the first foundation for New Jersey wind is complete but its maker sees trouble ahead

Biden made note that the ship is Jones Act compliant.

The Jones Act, also known as the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, is a federal law that requires cargo transported between U.S. ports to be conducted by U.S. flag ships, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Maritime Administration.

The Jones Act specifies that the ships must be U.S.-owned and -registered. The crews must be Americans.

In designing their own budding offshore wind policy, New Jersey officials made note that vessels toggling between ports would have to be compliant with the act — and that means U.S.-based jobs.

New Jersey has invested at least $1 billion into offshore wind. Murphy has set a goal of producing 7,500 megawatts of offshore wind by 2035 and 100% clean energy by 2050.

It is developing the New Jersey Wind Port in Lower Alloways Creek, Salem County, as a sort of wind hub where the giant parts for wind farms would be gathered and transferred, or made, for offshore wind projects off the state’s coast.

And it has helped back EEW’s monopile construction facility at the Paulsboro Marine Terminal, also on the Delaware River.

However, the Jones Act also has its detractors.

The libertarian-leaning Cato Institute issued a policy paper on the act, saying that it has restricted water transportation in the U.S. for a century between U.S. ports.

The think tank said the act has been justified as a national security measure, but it is really a cloaked protectionist measure that imposes significant economic costs to businesses.

The paper calls the Jones Act an “archaic, burdensome law” propped up by “motivations among those who benefit from the Jones Act’s protections and the vastly greater number who bear its costs” while leading to “higher prices, inefficiencies, and forgone opportunities.”

This article has been corrected to say that the Acadia is being built to handle 20,000 metric tons, not 20,000 million metric tons as originally stated.