GE Starts Tower Assembly for Block Island Turbines

General Electric (GE) is today officially kicking off the assembly of the towers for the wind turbines to be installed at the 30MW Block Island Wind Farm, the first offshore wind farm in the United States.

Built by Deepwater Wind and located three miles the coast of Block Island, Rhode Island, the wind farm is scheduled to come online at the end of 2016 and generate 125,000 megawatt-hours of electricity. That’s enough to meet 90 percent of Block Island’s power needs.

GE will today celebrate the milestone at a plant in the Port of Providence, where it will assemble the towers for the wind turbines.

Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo, Deepwater CEO Jeffrey Grybowski and Anders Soe-Jensen, CEO of GE Renewable Energy’s Offshore Wind Activity, will be present.

The wind farm will use five Haliade 150-6MW wind turbines, which GE acquired with Alstom last fall and manufactures inside a new plant at the mouth of the Loire River in Saint-Nazaire, France. The first tower sections arrived at the Port of Providence in November 2015.

The first Haliade produced by GE has recently left the factory for Denmark, where it will be installed on the Osterild site operated by the utility EDF EN.