First American-Built Offshore Substation Stands at South Fork Wind

July 27, 2023, by Adnan Memija

The first American-built offshore substation has been installed at the South Fork Wind site offshore New York, the state’s first offshore wind farm.

The 1,500-tonne, 60-foot-tall offshore substation was built by Kiewit Offshore Services, the largest offshore fabricator in the US, at its Ingleside facility near Corpus Christi, Texas.

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The substation departed from the facility in May and was transitioning across the Gulf of Mexico and then up the East Coast for installation at the South Fork Wind project site.

The monopile foundation as well as the topside was installed by Boskalis’s offshore installation vessel Bokalift 2.

More than 350 workers across three states supported the construction of this South Fork Wind substation, a topside structure that sits on a monopile foundation within the wind farm, collecting the power produced by twelve Siemens Gamesa 11 MW wind turbines and connecting it to the grid.

The wind turbines will be connected to each other and the offshore substation via inter-array cables delivered by the Greek subsea cable supplier Hellenic Cables.

The subsea export cables were installed in March, by the Belgian company DEME and run 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 make landfall at Beach Lane in Wainscott. From there, an underground cable leads to the Cove Hollow Road substation in East Hampton.

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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.

Once operational by the end of 2023, the 132 MW project will deliver enough clean energy to supply 70,000 Long Island homes, according to its developers.