Governor Carcieri signs a contract with Christopher Brown, CEO of Deepwater Wind, whose company will construct a wind energy project off the coast of Rhode Island.

The Providence Journal / Steve Szydlowski

NORTH KINGSTOWN –– The company selected to build a $1.5-billion wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island has never constructed an offshore project.

But yesterday, Governor Carcieri said he was confident that Deepwater Wind, the three-year-old New Jersey firm chosen to build the privately financed project, had the experience and the financial backing to get the job done.

“They’ve done projects, not offshore, but they’ve done projects in Hawaii, Maine and New York so they know how to do wind, they know what’s involved,” Carcieri said yesterday during the official announcement that Deepwater had beat six other bidders competing for the project.

In an interview after the event, held in a tent next to Narragansett Bay at the Quonset Business Park, the governor elaborated.

“There’s nobody other than in Europe that’s got any experience doing offshore here. They’ve got so much work in Europe there’s nobody rushing to come here right now.”

He said that one of the company’s three partners, First Wind Holdings of Newton, Mass., does have a lot of experience in developing land-based wind projects.

In addition, “they’ve got a financing partner that is very strong and is committed to a number of these projects. So I think you have the pieces here. When our team looked at all of them, this one came out head and shoulders.”

Rhode Island Democratic Party Chairman Bill Lynch, a political opponent of Carcieri, a Republican, issued a statement yesterday questioning Deepwater’s experience.

“Deepwater Wind has never developed an offshore wind farm or an onshore wind farm to my knowledge,” Lynch said.

According to a 10-page memo prepared by Andrew Dzykewicz, who headed the five-person selection committee, the companies were given scores based on three criteria: experience, price of electricity to be sold, and economic development impact on Rhode Island. Experience and price were each to account for 40 percent of the score, and the economic development aspect was to account for 20 percent.

Deepwater Wind outscored its six competitors in all three categories with a total score of 385 points. The runner-up was Bluewater Wind, also of New Jersey, with 322 points. (The memo did not explain how many points were possible.)

Much of Deepwater’s experience is attributed to its partnership with First Wind.

Chris Brown, chief executive officer of Deepwater Wind, declined to say what percentage of Deepwater was owned by First Wind. He described the company as a “strategic sponsor.”

First Wind is seeking to become a publicly traded company. It plans to raise money by selling its shares to pay down debt and to fund part of its expected capital expenditures this year and next year, according to its registration document filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Its total debt as of March 31 was $597 million.

The company has completed three relatively small wind projects: a 30-megawatt development in Maui, Hawaii; a 42-megawatt development in Mars Hill, Maine; and a 20-megawatt development in Lackawanna, N.Y. The proposed Rhode Island project would have a total capacity of 385 megawatts, about 15 percent of the state’s electricity usage.

However, First Wind has dozens of projects in various stages of completion. Those that the company expects to complete either next year or in 2010 are in New York, Vermont, Maine, Utah, Hawaii and Canada, and will have a total capacity of 720 megawatts, the company said in the filing.

In total, the company’s projects, both completed and in development, will have a capacity of 5,564 megawatts.

Last year, First Wind had total revenues of $12.3 million, and recorded a net loss of $68.1 million for the year, the company said in the filing.

The other two companies partnering with Deepwater are D. E. Shaw & Co., L.P. of New York, a global investment and technology development firm with more than 1,500 employees and $39 billion in investment and committed capital as of July 1; and Ospraie Management LLC of New York, one of the largest commodity hedge-fund firms.

Ospraie was in the news earlier this month after it announced it would close its biggest hedge fund after it fell 38.6 percent this year because of bad bets on commodity stocks, Bloomberg business news reported. The closing of the Ospraie Fund, which opened in 1999 and managed $2.8 billion at the start of August, leaves the firm with three funds, overseeing more than $4 billion of assets, down from $9 billion in March, Bloomberg said.

tbarmann@projo.com