Last January, Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey proclaimed in her State of the Commonwealth address: “We will make Massachusetts the climate innovation lab for the world. We’ll help climate tech companies not only start, but scale in Massachusetts, creating good jobs in the climate corridor we are building across the state. You can see it coming to life.” She’s not wrong.

Healey then cited several key players and projects as evidence, including Somerville-based Sublime Systems and the Vineyard Wind 1 project located 15 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard, which she noted, is “on its way to being the biggest offshore wind farm in North America.” Today, plans are underway to develop another farm—Vineyard Wind 2—that will far surpass the projected electricity production of its forerunner.

The Vineyard Wind 2 project, to be built in Federal Commercial Lease Area 0522, is projected to produce 1200 megawatts of renewable power, using an undisclosed number of wind turbines. To venture a guess, consider that Vineyard Wind 1 comprises 62 GE Haliade-X turbines that, at 13 megawatts each, will generate 806 MW of renewable electricity. (That’s enough to power 400,000 homes and businesses in New England.)

“Wind turbine technology is growing in scale, and every year there seems to be a larger offshore wind turbine available. So, that makes it possible to produce the same power with fewer turbines,” says Zach Fuerst, director of business development with Vineyard Offshore, the developer behind both projects.

A natural fit

Vineyard Offshore recently entered into a capacity reservation agreement with Sublime Systems to purchase 2000 tons of Sublime’s ultra-low-carbon cement, created using an electrochemical reactor that nearly eliminates both phases of carbon emissions—burning coal to fire up the kiln and cooking the limestone—associated with producing standard Portland cement.

This deal is conditional upon Vineyard Offshore being awarded an offtake contract in the ongoing offshore wind solicitations by Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island for Vineyard Wind 2. Should that likelihood occur, Sublime’s product could be deployed in any number of ways.

“There is quite a bit of concrete in an offshore wind farm, and it’s not always the components you think about,” Fuerst says. A turbine’s base and working platforms make the list, as do concrete duct banks at the shore, which house transmission cables. “And of course, there’s concrete in all the civil works that are needed to integrate offshore wind power into the New England grid.”

For a company like Sublime Systems, whose product recently made headlines for its use in One Boston Wharf, a prominent office building in Boston’s Seaport District, an agreement of this type may come as a surprise. After all, Sublime remains a startup in the strictest sense, so one might expect its technology to be deployed on a more modest scale, being used almost exclusively in foundations, parking lots, foyers, and the like, at least in its nascent years. Looking a bit deeper, Sublime and Vineyard coming together in this way, at this time, makes perfect sense.

“Vineyard is producing clean electricity, so it only makes sense to build with clean materials,” says Joe Hicken, VP of policy and business development with Sublime Systems.

Fuerst concurs. “We’re in the same climate space and are both mission driven. They’re developing ultra-low-carbon cement, and we want to not only displace fossil fuel generation and replace it with green electrons from offshore wind but are also concerned about what we’re building being sustainable … it’s a natural partnership.”

The value-adds

Like others operating in the green cement space, Sublime certainly emphasizes its product’s innovative tech and low-carbon dividends, but within the broader marketing scheme, such benefits are seldom tied to any climate imperative. Rather, the primary value-add being sold is longevity and performance.

“We don’t want our end users to expect a difference in performance,” Hicken says. “We’re designing it so they can be integrated [into existing] designs. We’re not asking the construction industry to bend around us; we just provide a product that results in the same calcium silicate hydrate concrete at the end of the day.”

But in the case of Vineyard Offshore, which operates in an industry that Hicken asserts is “decades ahead of clean concrete,” at least in terms of mainstreaming its product, Sublime’s value-add is very much tied to embodied carbon reductions for Vineyard Offshore’s larger operation.

Hicken explains: “The owners of the actual infrastructure who ultimately own the embodied carbon of the structure that’s being built [are] the ones who are incentivized to think about the totality of their carbon footprint.”

Construction and production in step

Last April, Sublime Systems secured $87 million in DOE funding, an amount that will largely aid in getting its forthcoming commercial facility in Holyoke, Massachusetts online. This manufacturing plant, to be housed in former paper mills and spread across 16 acres on the banks of the Connecticut River, is projected to produce upwards of 30,000 tons per year. Vineyard Offshore’s order represents about 7% of that production.

Further, Vineyard’s own construction timeline, which remains tentative, lines up perfectly with Sublime’s production timeline. The Holyoke plant is expected to open in 2026. Fuerst confirms that Vineyard Wind 2, pending approval, will start construction in 2027 and reach commercial operation by 2031.

Sublime’s and Vineyard’s paths initially crossed because of a mutual partnership. The MIT spinout known as The Engine, a venture capital firm that supports climate technologies it deems ambitious but feasible, includes Sublime Systems in its portfolio. According to Fuerst, “We became a network member of The Engine to be more involved in that space and to learn about other climate tech startups that might have mutual interests.”

Under Fuerst’s guidance, Vineyard approached Sublime last year. “We asked them what they had planned, and that’s when we learned about their facility in Holyoke.” Their operation is attractive to Vineyard, Fuerst says, because it will drive “a massive amount of economic development. It creates jobs, it develops and redevelops infrastructure.”

Filling a niche

For Sublime’s part, Hicken insists that his company “is simply a cement manufacturer,” but pivots on that point by highlighting the growing industry trend of prioritizing low-carbon solutions, and how that is fast becoming integral to many manufacturers’ long-term business planning.

“They’ve developed environmental product declarations (EPDs) for their concrete products, and a lot of producers are trying to lower the embodied carbon of concrete, which is a really hard thing to do,” he says. “Cement is intrinsically carbon intensive.”

Hicken continues: “We’ve invested a great deal in our best-in-class concrete testing lab to put the materials through the ASTM International standards for accelerated durability testing and compressive strength, as well as the ACI codes for concrete specifications.”

Along with this ongoing quality assurance work, Sublime is scaling up by working with several general contractors and producers who have the capacity to get the product to job sites. “We have several reservation agreements stacked up,” Hicken says. “[Vineyard Offshore] is the first customer that wants to talk about it, largely because it’s so aligned with their mission to reduce carbon in the environment.”

The precise nature of this partnership, in aligning the practices and mission of a low-carbon building product manufacturer and a developer of renewable energy, is indeed a perfect marriage. It is also a partnership that for the time being remains all too rare. Pending approval of Vineyard Wind 2 and Sublime’s Holyoke facility staying on schedule, there is cause for optimism that it will be a model for like-minded industry players to follow suit.

_______________________________________________________________________