A mighty wind
Changes are blowin’ in the … you know
It turns out that energy production off America’s coastline is not just the province of oil and gas developers any more.
It’s been a long time coming, but America’s first commercial-scale offshore wind farm is up and running, with the capacity to provide 132 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 70,000 homes. It’s called South Fork Wind, located 35 miles east of Montauk Point,
N.Y.
Supporters believe it will pave the way for more of the same.
The Biden administration has approved six commercial-scale offshore wind energy projects, and auctioned lease areas for offshore wind for the first time off the Pacific Ocean and Gulf of Mexico in the same way the federal government auctions offshore acreage for oil and gas development.
Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York said this is just the beginning, and is a turning point for an industry that has long struggled to complete projects because of a number of factors, not the least of which have been high inflation, supply chain disruptions and the rising cost of capital and building materials.
“It’s great to be first—we want to make sure we’re not the last. That’s why we’re showing other states how it can be done, why we’re moving forward,” Hochul told the Associated Press. “This is the date and the time that people will look back in the history of our nation and say, ‘This is when it changed.’”
The companies that built South Fork, Norwegian company Orsted and the utility Eversource, are now moving on to complete a wind farm more than five times its size, Revolution Wind, which will be Rhode Island and Connecticut’s first commercial-scale offshore wind farm, powering more than 350,000 homes. The site for the cable to connect Rhode Island and Connecticut is already under construction.
The companies are also in contract negotiations with the state of New York to develop an even larger wind farm, Sunrise Wind, to power 600,000 homes. Further, the companies are building Empire Wind 1 to power more than 500,000 New York homes. That project is expected to start providing power in 2026.
Many ways exist to create electricity in the world. No matter which one is your favorite, that world increasingly needs more and more energy every year. The kind that doesn’t put carbon into our air, and our lungs, is the best kind. But until now, it seemed renewables could only do one light bulb at a time. Now that industry is thinking in terms of hundreds of thousands of homes per year.
Maybe one day, we can remove politics from the mix and understand that the peaceful coexistence of renewable and conventional energy is not only a possibility, but a necessity.