Vineyard Wind, the country’s largest offshore wind project to be federally permitted and constructed, is fully up and running about 15 miles off the coast of Massachusetts.
Getting to this point has been a journey filled with starts and stops, and then more starts and stops. At times, it seemed unclear whether the project — which served as a test case of the country’s burgeoning offshore wind industry — would ever get over the finish line.
But now, more than eight years after Massachusetts selected the project in its first offshore wind auction, it has hit its final major milestone.
“On Thursday, October 29, Vineyard Wind 1 reached full commercial operations, further strengthening New England’s energy supply,” Craig Gilvarg, a Vineyard Wind spokesperson, wrote in an email to WBUR.
The news comes just hours after another offshore wind project in the region, Revolution Wind, announced it had reached full power. And it means that as New England heads into winter, it has significantly more clean energy on the grid than in years past.
“New England is better off now that we have not one but TWO fully commercially operational projects,” Katie Segal, senior director of offshore wind for the Environmental League of Massachusetts, wrote in a text. “We are in for a difficult winter and wind will help with costs and reliability.”
Vineyard Wind’s 62 turbines are capable of generating 800 megawatts, which is enough electricity to power about 400,000 homes in the region. The slightly smaller Revolution Wind project can generate 704 megawatts and power about 350,000 homes.
Offshore wind has long been a cornerstone of New England’s energy plans. The six states have no oil or gas reserves, and there’s not a ton of open land to build renewables like solar and onshore wind. But the region does have phenomenal conditions for offshore wind — the relatively shallow waters off the coast have some of the strongest and most consistent winds in the world.
Still, what looks good on paper has played out differently in practice. The U.S. offshore wind industry has faced years of economic and political headwinds. Even now, the future of all but a handful of projects is unclear.
Vineyard Wind in particular has had a difficult road. The project’s timeline has been pushed back several times, beginning in 2019 when the first Trump administration held up the permitting process indefinitely.
The project eventually got the green light to start construction when President Biden came into office, but even that process didn’t always go smoothly. In 2024, a faulty turbine blade snapped, sending debris plunging into the ocean. Much of it washed up on the shores of Nantucket, causing a public outcry and triggering a federal investigation that set the project’s timeline back again.
Then, in late December 2025, when the project was 95% complete, the Trump administration handed down stop work orders to Vineyard Wind and four other projects under construction. The U.S. Interior Department claimed the projects posed a national security threat, though several federal judges disagreed, and eventually the projects were allowed to resume.
In mid-March, Vineyard Wind announced it had completed construction and was working to get the final turbines online and connected to the New England grid. All told, the $4.5 billion project employed about 3,500 people, many of them union workers.
What comes next for the U.S. offshore wind industry remains to be seen. Since taking office in early 2025, the Trump administration has tried to hobble it with executive actions, stop-work orders and a blanket permitting pause that has effectively frozen progress on all but five projects that were already under construction.
There is some hope among wind advocates that a federal permitting reform bill currently being negotiated in Congress could provide more certainty to projects, and prevent future administrations from discriminating against projects or power sources they don’t like. But the future of this legislation is also up in the air.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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