GRENAA, Denmark — April 28, 2013 — The New Bedford trade delegation arrived dockside Friday in Grenaa shortly after 11:30 a.m. A week of Powerpoint presentations, panel discussions, and visits to manufacturing plants and port facilities had been building to this moment: a two-hour boat tour to the Anholt Wind farm, about 15 nautical miles off the Danish coast.
"This is the first time we've all seen a wind farm in construction," New Bedford Economic Development Council Executive Director Matthew Morrissey told the captain of the "Elegant Tern," one of two boats that carried the city team out to the site. "We're all kind of giddy about it."
Work related to the park, which is owned by Danish utility Dong Energy and two pension funds, started about four years ago. On Friday, officials at Siemens, which is supplying and installing 111 3.6-megawatt turbines at the site, said 46 were already generating energy. The rest were on schedule to be completed by the end of the year.
The 400-megawatt wind farm — slightly smaller than Cape Wind's 468—megawatt plans for Nantucket Sound — is expected to meet five percent of Denmark's electricity demand. (Denmark's population is 5.6 million people; Massachusetts is home to 6.6 million people.)
All told, about 3,000 people are involved in the project, the majority of them in blue-collar positions, according to Mikkel Moller Madsen, the site manager for Siemens.
Siemens, which is responsible for about 70 percent of the world's offshore wind market and will be supplying the windmills for the Cape Wind site, uses subcontractors to supply 80 percent of the workforce, he said.
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