New York’s First Offshore Wind Farm Linked to Land

March 29, 2023, by Adrijana Buljan

The subsea export cable for the South Fork wind farm offshore New York has now been installed, according to an update Eversource Energy posted on social media.

Photo source: Eversource Energy on Twitter

The installation work, carried out by the Belgian company DEME using its dual-fuel cable laying vessel Living Stone, started in February with seabed preparation which included relocating boulders from the cable route and surveying the route for debris or ghost gear that needs to be removed.

The nearshore section of the export cable, measuring some 52 kilometres in length, was laid first, followed by the offshore section. The cables will be buried to a target depth of between 1.2 and 1.8 metres.

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The export cable sections have been supplied by Nexans under a contract the French offshore wind cable manufacturer signed with South Fork Wind, a 50/50 joint venture between Ørsted and Eversource, in 2022.

Nexans manufactured the cables at its newly transformed subsea high voltage plant in Charleston, South Carolina.

The three-phase 138 kV high voltage alternative current (HVAC) cables are integrated with two fibre-optic cables and will transmit electricity produced by the 132 MW wind farm to Long Island.

The export cable runs from the offshore wind farm’s site, located some 30 kilometres southeast of Block Island and some 56 kilometres east of Montauk Point, New York, and makes landfall at Beach Lane in Wainscott. From there, an underground cable leads to the Cove Hollow Road substation in East Hampton.

South Fork Wind, for which Ørsted and Eversource reached the final investment decision (FID) at the beginning of last year, will be New York’s first offshore wind farm and the second commercial-scale project of this kind to be built in the US, following Vineyard Wind.

The 132 MW South Fork offshore wind farm will comprise twelve 11 MW Siemens Gamesa turbines, which will be connected to each other and the offshore substation via inter-array cables delivered by the Greek subsea cable supplier Hellenic Cables.

Offshore installation of the wind farm’s monopile foundations and wind turbines is expected to begin this summer.