South Fork Wind Farm off Rhode Island's coast starts producing power

The nation’s first utility-scale offshore wind farm is fully operational and capable of sending its entire capacity of power to the electric grid.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and other state and federal officials flipped a symbolic switch on Thursday, marking the completion of the South Fork Wind Farm, a 12-turbine project built off the Rhode Island coast and connected to the Long Island energy system.

“This will serve as a beacon to the rest of the nation, a statement of what is possible,” Hochul said at the event at Stony Brook University’s Southampton campus on Long Island.

South Fork Wind Farm is the first large offshore wind farm in the country

The 132-megawatt wind farm is expected to generate enough power for about 70,000 homes and businesses, making it the first large offshore wind farm in America.

It comes seven years after the Block Island Wind Farm, a demonstration project of 30 megawatts built in Rhode Island state waters, became the first project to deliver offshore wind power to the grid.

Danish offshore wind giant  Ørsted, the owner of the Block Island project, built the South Fork Wind Farm in partnership with Eversource, a New England utility. Part of the work for the project, which is located about 19 miles southeast of Block Island, was staged from the Port of Providence.

Other offshore wind projects in the works

The two companies are also working together to build Revolution Wind, a 704-megawatt offshore wind farm that would be located near their South Fork project. They started onshore construction last year and are set to move offshore in the next few months.

The Revolution project, which would power about 350,000 homes and businesses, would send 400 megawatts of capacity to Rhode Island and the remainder to Connecticut.

Another major offshore wind project in the region, this one closer to Martha’s Vineyard, started offshore construction last year around the same time as South Fork but has yet to be completed. At 800 megawatts, Vineyard Wind is much larger.

Three weeks ago, developers Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners and Avangrid Renewables announced that nine turbines had been installed and that five of them had started delivering power.

At Thursday’s event, Deb Haaland, secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior, said that the nation is making progress toward the Biden administration’s goal of developing 30,000 megawatts of offshore wind by 2030.

“It’s happening right here and right now,” she said.

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: First large offshore wind farm in the nation is now producing power