First Steel in Water at New York’s First Offshore Wind Farm

June 23, 2023, by Adrijana Buljan

The first monopile foundation has been installed at the South Fork Wind site offshore New York, the state’s first offshore wind farm. The foundation will support the project’s offshore substation, which will also be installed in the coming days.

Boskalis’s offshore installation vessel Bokalift 2 is transporting and installing the foundations, including the one for the substation, the first US-built offshore wind substation.

Kiewit Offshore Services, the largest offshore fabricator in the US, designed and built the substation at its Ingleside facility near Corpus Christi, Texas, from where it departed to New York last month.

More than 350 workers across three US states supported the construction of the South Fork Wind substation, a topside structure that will sit on the monopile foundation, and New York union workers will be supporting its installation offshore, according to the project developers Ørsted and Eversource.

Foundation components, also built by union workers, will now be transported to the site for installation, followed by the installation of the wind farm’s twelve Siemens Gamesa 11 MW wind turbines.

In a press release on reaching the “steel in the water” milestone on South Fork Wind, Ørsted and Eversource highlighted the local content component of the project.

Last year, Ørsted signed the National Offshore Wind Agreement (NOWA) with North America’s Building Trades Unions, a first-of-its-kind in the United States, which covers all of the company’s contractors and subcontractors that will perform offshore wind farm construction.

Once in operation, South Fork Wind will also employ the ECO Edison, the first-ever US-flagged, Jones Act-compliant offshore wind service operations vessel (SOV), as well as US-built crew transfer vessels.

The developers say the South Fork Wind project remains on track to become the first US utility-scale offshore wind farm to be completed in federal waters when it begins operations by the end of this year.

The US has another offshore wind farm recently reaching the same milestone, Vineyard Wind 1, currently under construction offshore Massachusetts after the first foundation was installed at the beginning of June, which also bears the flag of the first commercial-scale offshore wind farm in the country.

While Vineyard Wind 1 is the first offshore wind project of this scale to be approved for construction by federal authorities and the first commercial-scale offshore wind farm in the US to achieve financial close, the 800 MW wind farm features 50 turbines more than South Fork Wind.

All 62 of Vineyard Wind 1’s Haliade-X 13 MW turbines are expected to be installed by the end of the year and the wind farm is expected to produce its first power by then, but its commercial operation date is scheduled for 2024.