By GREGORY ZELLER //
Marking an “awesome milestone” for the burgeoning U.S. offshore-wind industry – and a red-letter day for international partners Ørsted A/S and Eversource Energy – the first of 12 gigantic turbines is rising at South Fork Wind.
The enormous components of a Siemens Gamesa wind-turbine generator – including prefabricated towers, an enormous nacelle and three turbine blades, each longer than a football field – were loaded this weekend onto a transport barge, and on Tuesday were hauled away from Connecticut’s Port of New London by two U.S.-flagged tugboats.
It was a last leg for the well-traveled components, which were manufactured in Europe and shipped by boat to the New London staging area to await their destiny: the heart of New York State’s first offshore wind farm, located roughly 35 miles east of Montauk Point.
On Wednesday, the tugs rendezvoused with the advanced offshore-installation vessel Aeolus – innovative flagship of Dutch marine contractor Van Oord – and construction of South Fork Wind’s momentous first turbine officially began.
Jennifer Garvey: Clean energy, with awesomesauce.
It’s not actually the groundbreaking (so to speak) for the entire offshore-wind project; that came in 2022, when work began on a hotly contested onshore cable facility on East Hampton’s Wainscott Beach. And South Fork Wind first put “steel in the water” in June, when the project’s first monopile foundation was installed.
But construction of the first mighty turbine is more than just “another sign of progress for South Fork Wind,” according to Ørsted spokeswoman Jennifer Garvey, who framed this latest phase as the hard-won bellwether of a brighter energy future.
“It has taken a long time to get to this awesome milestone,” Garvey, Ørsted’s head of New York market strategy, said Monday. “South Fork is a trailblazing project for New York that is almost 10 years in the making … and now, we’re looking forward to delivering clean power very shortly.”
As in, very shortly: Via a 68-nautical-mile underwater cable leading to that Wainscott Beach landing station (which is plugged directly into a nearby Long Island Power Authority substation), Ørsted and Eversource plan to feed clean, wind-generated electricity into the regional power grid before the end of this calendar year.
The completed offshore farm is projected to generate 130 megawatts of electricity, but that’s coming in stages that are tricky to predict. Each of the 12 planned turbines can be brought online as soon as it’s installed, Garvey noted, but actual construction timetables – including buildout of the inaugural turbine – are “highly weather dependent.”
All aboard: Components of the first South Fork Wind turbine are loaded onto their transport barge.
“It should go quickly,” Garvey told Innovate Long Island. “But how quickly we can get each turbine installed really depends on what the weather looks like.”
Whenever it’s completed, South Shore Wind figures to be a major component in New York State’s ambitious clean-energy strategy, which includes the development of 9,000 megawatts of offshore-wind power by 2035. Those 130 projected megawatts would be enough to satisfy about 70,000 LIPA customers, while simultaneously eliminating some 6 million tons of carbon emissions.
Ørsted Group EVP and CEO Americas Dave Hardy on Wednesday predicted “busy weeks ahead,” but called the launch of the first turbine a giant leap toward “fulfilling the promise of clean energy for Long Island’s East End and the growth of a new industry for New York.”
“The upcoming installation of this first turbine has been nearly a decade in the making,” Hardy said in a statement. “[It] will stand as a testament not just to our hardworking teams, but also to all those who have long supported this historic project.”
