The trio of developers with offshore projects facing Massachusetts welcomed the draft request for proposal (RFP) the state’s utilities issued in May — but it turns out the developers have very different ideas about how big the first round of projects should be.

Denmark’s Dong Energy, which controls the Bay State zone, and is the world’s leading offshore wind developer, is known to favour a larger project size — arguing for economies of scale. Deepwater Wind, which has built an impressive lead in the US offshore market, believes the market would be best served initially with a smaller project, giving the supply chain and investment community time to catch up. And Vineyard Wind, owned by Iberdrola’s Avangrid and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, seems to be somewhere in the middle.

In Massachusetts’ draft RFP — to be finalised in late June — the utilities require all developers to bid on an initial 400MW off-take contract. In addition to those 400MW bids, the utilities inserted some flexibility — apparently at the request of the developers — allowing them to place additional bids for as little as 200MW or as much as 800MW.

“There’s a reason that 200MW is in the [RFP], and there’s a reason 800MW is in there,” says Bryan Martin, chairman of Deepwater Wind and managing director at DE Shaw, the developer’s hedge-fund owner. “We’re going to let the market speak.”

He adds: “I think an 800MW project is extremely challenging in the US right now; frankly I don’t think it’s realistic.

“It’s easy for somebody to go bid an 800MW project because it’s good for them, or because they need to build a vessel or whatever it is. My fear for the Massachusetts process is there’s going to be very large projects, where the person bidding doesn’t even know that it’s not doable.”

Jonathan Cole, managing director at Iberdrola Renewables Offshore, says his biggest concern for the US is that overly aggressive bidding on cost could lead to a “false start” for the market. Massachusetts has mandated that its utilities sign 1.6GW of off-take contracts by 2027, but there’s no prescribed construction timeline, Cole points out.

“The risk is we end up running a competition that really focuses on low prices, which means projects get deferred until turbines have got even bigger and costs have come down even more,” Cole says. “And what actually happens is nothing — none of the projects come through.

“The big thing we need to do in the US is set out a credible road map, project by project, state by state. Building the industry and driving up industrialisation, yes, but fully expecting this is going to be an evolutionary process.”

Battle for US offshore wind jobs hots up