Commercial Development Company, which in 2018 bought the shuttered Brayton Point coal-fired power plant in Somerset, Massachusetts, is redeveloping the property into a renewable energy hub with the goal of setting what it calls a “new standard” for former fossil fuel power plant sites.
Once the largest fossil-fuel power plant in New England with 1600 megawatts of electricity generated before it closed in 2017, the property, being redeveloped as Brayton Point Commerce Center, seeks to enliven an area that Commercial Development said is “at risk of entering a prolonged state of decay and deterioration.”
Commercial Development has invested millions of dollars in areas including demolitions and environmental remediation. It said the site is now home to a Mayflower Wind Energy electric converter station, which will connect renewable energy directly to the New England grid. The site also will be home to a future subsea cable manufacturing facility that Italian cable manufacturer Prysmian Group is building to bring renewable energy onshore.
The project also wants to tap into what has made the site successful in the past: its 300 acres of waterfront land, a 34-foot deep water port, and access to what’s billed as a strong local talent pool. “Brayton Point is on the frontier of clean energy in America,” President Joe Biden said in July when he visited.
The bid to turn a closed coal-fired power plant into a renewable energy hub stood out and made the project the winner of a 2023 CoStar Impact Award for best redevelopment of the year in Boston, as judged by real estate professionals familiar with the market.
About the project: Brayton Point Commerce Center is about an hour’s drive south of Boston. Prysmian in February 2022 agreed to buy 47 acres there to build the $250 million subsea cable manufacturing plant and estimates the project will create 300 jobs.
Mayflower has said construction costs for the offshore wind connection facility will be $275 million. In addition to manufacturing components for the offshore wind industry, Brayton Point also will be the landing point for renewable energy when it comes onshore. In December 2021, Mayflower, which this year renamed itself SouthCoast Wind Energy, was awarded a 400-megawatt power purchase agreement to develop an offshore wind farm 20 miles south of Nantucket, a tiny island off Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The generated electricity will travel via underground cables and connect to the preexisting grid at Brayton Point. The cables will transfer renewable energy to a converter station and link to a National Grid substation to be delivered to local residents and businesses.
What the judges said: “Commercial Development’s redevelopment of Brayton Point from a vacant, decrepit power plant into a green energy and manufacturing site is a major win for the south coast of Massachusetts,” said Drew Kirkland, senior associate of Northeast Private Client Group.
They made it happen: Stephen Collins, executive vice president of Commercial Development Company, Hakan Ozmen, executive vice president of Prysmian; Bill Follett, engineering director of Mayflower; and Russ Becker, president of EnviroAnalytics Group, worked on the project.