A turbine blade more than 300 feet long. The $4 billion Vineyard Wind project is expected to start generating electricity by year’s end. Bob O’Connor for The New York Times

On previous occasions when we linked to stories about windfarms‘ large turbines, we have noticed that aesthetics can get in the way of progress, so thanks to Stanley Reed and Ivan Penn for this reporting from the New England coast:

A Giant Wind Farm Is Taking Root Off Massachusetts

The offshore energy project will have turbines taller than any building in Boston, but they will be barely visible from Martha’s Vineyard.

On a chilly June day, with the Massachusetts island of Martha’s Vineyard just over the distant horizon, a low-riding, green-hulled vessel finished hammering a steel column nearly 100 feet into the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

This was the beginning of construction of the first giant wind farm off the United States coast, a project with the scale to make a large contribution to the Northeast power grid.

For some of those looking on from a nearby boat, the driving in of the first piling marked a milestone they had labored to reach for two decades. The $4 billion project, known as Vineyard Wind, is expected to start generating electricity by year’s end.

“This has been really hard,” said Rachel Pachter, the chief development officer of Vineyard Offshore, the American arm of Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, a Danish renewable energy developer that is a co-owner of the wind farm. To bring a big energy project to this point near population centers requires clearing countless regulatory hurdles and heading off potential opposition and litigation.

“You don’t see large infrastructure projects built in New England anymore,” she said, “and certainly not in places where they are highly visible.”

Ms. Pachter has seen the difficulties firsthand. Starting in 2002 as an intern just out of college, she worked for more than a decade on a project off Massachusetts called Cape Wind; it ultimately failed, in part because of intense opposition over the years by people like Senator Edward M. Kennedy, who died in 2009, and the billionaire William Koch. Vineyard Wind, too, has pockets of vociferous opposition. Some people in the fishing industry say turbines will make their job nearly impossible.

Ms. Pachter, though, has helped orchestrate a campaign of community outreach, job creation and funding that has finally led to a point where, in industry parlance, steel is going into the water…

Read the whole article here.