Wind turbine components ready to load onto a ship. (Sunrise Wind and Ørsted)
George Harvey
For a long time, it looked like offshore wind power in the United States had got stuck in the doldrums. The Block Island wind project went into operation in 2016, with five turbines of 6 megawatts (MW) each. After that, it took another four years for the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind pilot project to be installed, with two turbines, also of 6 MW. So, the total offshore wind power for the U.S.A. came to 42 MW, a paltry figure compared to the offshore wind farms in the Irish Sea, the North Sea, the Baltic Sea, and elsewhere.
COVID-19 brought with it several problems, including supply-chain issues and inflation. The result was that some of the wind farms in U.S. waters had to be canceled or re-negotiated. Ocean Wind 1 and 2, off the coast of New Jersey, were canceled by developer Ørsted because of a poor financial outlook in 2023.
Things started to improve, and construction began on the South Fork Wind Farm, in Rhode Island waters off the South Fork of eastern Long Island. It is to supply electricity to New York. This wind farm is large, compared to what came before it. It has 13 turbines of nearly 11 MW each, and has a nameplate capacity of 130 MW. It was completed in under two years and was put into operation in February of 2024.
Readers with sharp eyes and a mind for numbers might look at the sizes of the turbines for offshore wind power and as why the turbines are so large. The answer to that is that they are because they can be. Huge turbines require huge blades, and the Siemens Gamesa turbines at South Fork have a windswept area 200 meters across. The blades are 97 meters (318.25 feet) long, and that is simply too long to be transported on land.
The United States now has a total of three offshore wind farms, two of which are tiny and one is small. But the next few should be coming along soon, with one possible hitch. The next offshore windfarm, which scheduled to be made operational later this year, is Vineyard Wind 1. The wind farm is to have 62 Haliade-X wind turbines of 13 MW each, for a nameplate capacity of 804 MW. Electricity from the first of these started going to the grid in January of 2024. The hitch came, however, when one of the blades came apart on July 13. These blades are 351 feet long, and weigh 57 tons, so the problem was on a large scale.
Pieces of broken blade, made of fiberglass and plastic foam, wound up floating to beaches on Nantucket Island, where their sharp edges were dangerous. They forced the beaches to be closed until authorities could be sure that all the material was accounted for. Also, construction and operation of the wind farm has been suspended by the Interior Department’s office of safety. According to Scott Strazik, CEO of GE Vernova, which made the turbine, the problem was due to a “manufacturing deviation,” and not an error in the design or installation of the blade.
We cannot know at this point when the Vineyard Wind 1 project will be completed this year. It had been scheduled to be finished, but the people at the Interior Department must give a go-ahead for construction to continue. Meanwhile, other projects proceed.
The country’s first very large offshore wind farm is scheduled to be delivering power to the grid in 2026. It is Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project, which began as a pilot project in 2020. According to one source, as a complete project, it is to be composed of 176 Siemens Gamesa 14-MW turbines for a total capacity of 2,640 MW. The numbers do not compute properly, and the fault could be that the turbines are actually 15-MW each, since that does compute properly and a turbine of that size is available.
Of late, we have information about the Sunrise Wind project, which is to be installed in the waters of Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Like the Coastal Virginia project, it is to be finished in 2026, but the data we have seems to be more developed. Sunrise wind will be built by Ørsted and Con Ed. It will comprise 84 turbines of 11 MW each. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management announced its approval of the Construction and Operations Plan for the Sunrise Wind Project.
The approval of the Sunrise Wind project shows off the Biden Administration’s commitment to advancing renewable energy to fight climate change. It will employ 800 workers during construction and 300 for regular operations. It will also lead to about 1,000 other jobs being created indirectly.
There are several other offshore wind farms being developed off the U.S. Atlantic coast. Altogether, thirteen have either been built, are under construction, or have been approved.
The latest news on wind farms in the Northeast is that the New England states were awarded $389 million by the Department of Energy to upgrade the electric grid to increase the capacity of offshore windpower. The funding will allow 4.8 gigawatts of increased offshore wind capacity, along with such other improvements as a battery facility in Maine, according to a report by Canary Media. (bit.ly/CanaryOffshore)
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