Wind turbines go to work 16 miles off the Rhode Island coast.

Offshore wind turbines seemed a bit, well, gimmicky to me until a few years ago when I saw a farm calmly spinning its blades as I flew home from Europe. Anything that keeps working in the North Sea is entirely real. Now they have arrived in 600-foot-form off the New England coast, as I saw last month in a trip to Deepwater Wind’s installation off Block Island (thanks, Noelle Swan and the New England Association of Science Writers!). These giant beasts won’t always be easy to maintain, as we saw watching a crew struggling to jump onto one tower from a support vessel in gentle six-foot swells from Hurricane Maria. The 240-foot blades are no favor to offshore birds. But Deepwater Wind seems to have made every reasonable effort to minimize and monitor the overall environmental impact of the turbines, as attested by the National Wildlife Federation scientist onboard our fast ferry. Ocean wind turbine technology is advancing rapidly, one example being the replacement of the traditional gearbox with a GE direct-drive permanent magnet generator, noted Willett Kempton of the University of Delaware’s ocean wind power program. Wind turbines can tap steady winds at sea, where they can be built much larger than on land, and a wealth of projects are planned along the U.S. east coast. Yes, they’re designed to survive hurricanes, although maybe not a problem like Maria. And although offshore wind still can’t produce power here as cheaply as fossil-fuel plants, European wind costs are already below that mark.