Sunrise Wind to Host Virtual Open House as South Fork Wind Farm Gears Up for Turbine Installation
Sunrise Wind, a 924-megawatt offshore wind farm partnership between Ørsted and Eversource adjacent to the companies’ South Fork Wind Farm, will hold a virtual open house to inform the public about the wind farm’s construction process this Wednesday, Aug. 16 at 6 p.m.
The wind farm will power Long Island through a transmission cable slated to come ashore at Smith Point Beach and tie into a substation off of William Floyd Parkway in Holbrook.
Sunrise Wind is slated to be a little more than 30 miles east of Montauk, very near the South Fork Wind Farm site, and will provide 924 megawatts of electricity in its first phase, which is slated to be completed in 2025. It can power as many as 600,000 homes on Long Island.
As part of the project, Ørsted and Eversource are investing $10 million in a National Workforce Training Center for the industry at Suffolk County Community College’s Brentwood campus, and is building an Operation and Maintenance Hub in Port Jefferson, which will be home to a new 262-foot Service Operations Vessel, the Eco Edison, to service the companies’ wind farms here.
Sunrise Wind submitted expansion plans as part of the third round of NYSERDA solicitations for offshore wind last winter. New York State is looking for an additional 2,000 megawatts of offshore wind power to augment 4,300 megawatts of wind power already under development. Offshore wind is slated to play a major role in the state’s pledge to produce 70 percent of its electricity from renewable energy by 2030 and to produce 100 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2040. The state plans to announce the award winners for that solicitation in the fourth quarter of this year.
South Fork Wind, slated to go into service at the end of this year, finished installing its offshore substation and the foundations for its 12 wind turbines in early August. Those turbines are slated to provide power to up to 70,000 East End homes. It will be the first offshore wind farm to supply power to New York State when it goes into service at the end of this year.
Later this summer and into the fall, South Fork Wind is slated to begin installing the wind turbine generators. According to Ørsted and Eversource, the first turbine tower sections for South Fork Wind arrived last month at State Pier in New London, Conn. The remaining tower sections — as well as turbine blades and nacelles — will be arriving in the coming weeks.
Here’s how to sign up to attend the Sunrise Wind virtual open house.
