First US-made offshore wind substation completed for Orsted-Eversource's South Fork array

The US renewable energy supply chain marked a major milestone with the completion of the first made-in-America offshore wind substation for South Fork off New York.

The 1,500-tonne, 60-foot (18-metre) substation built by Kiewit Offshore Services at its Ingleside factory near Corpus Christi, Texas, is now being shipped to Long Island, New York. It will collect power and channel it to the grid for the 132MW wind farm under development by the joint venture (JV) of Orsted and New England utility Eversource.

“We’re putting American ingenuity to work as we build out a domestic offshore wind energy supply chain with investments and job opportunities spanning the Northeast, down to Texas and across the Gulf Coast region,” said David Hardy, group executive vice president and CEO Americas at Orsted.

“The completion of South Fork Wind’s offshore wind substation is yet another first for this groundbreaking project,” Hardy added, and builds momentum for the fledgling supply chain that is looking to diversify from its reliance on European contractors.

“South Fork Wind continues to demonstrate the enormous power of offshore wind to create a new, American-based supply chain as we work to grow the clean energy industry here in the US,” said Mike Ausere, vice president of business development at Eversource.

Lack of supply chain capacity is among key bottlenecks facing the US offshore wind sector as it ramps towards the Biden administration’s goal of 30GW by 2030.

Baltimore, Maryland-based trade group Business Network for Offshore Wind has identified $17bn in supplier investments since 2014, including manufacturing facilities, ports, and vessels.

Washington, DC based industry advocacy group American Clean Power Association (ACP) noted that publicly available investment amounts for sector manufacturing facilities currently tops $1.7bn.

The landmark 2022 federal climate law is set to turbocharge renewable energy investment, and ACP’s recent industry report highlighted that it has already ignited some $150bn in solar, wind, and storage supply chain investment announcements. Not all of these are firm commitments.

The pacesetting developer duo is investing heavily into US supply chain and port infrastructure, including pitching in $75m for the $250m upgrade to State Pier in New London Connecticut. The port will serve as marshalling hub for all three of their projects, including South Fork as well as Revolution and Sunrise wind arrays.

The JV has also commissioned the first Jones Act-qualified service operations vessel (SOV) under construction by Edison Chouest Offshore (ECO). More than 400 workers are building the vessel at ECO shipyards in Louisiana, Mississippi and Florida, with components of the vessel sourced from across 34 states.

The Jones Act prohibits foreign-flagged vessels from calling in at consecutive US ports or points on the outer continental shelf, including wind turbines.

South Fork is the second project to be fully approved and move into construction by federal and state regulators. It will be the first to reach full commercial operations.

The JV has already begun installation of the 68-nautical mile (126-km) export cable from its landfall below Wainscott Beach, in East Hampton, to the wind farm site roughly 35 miles (56 km) east of Montauk, New York.

The project's power will be purchased by the Long Island Power Authority, a state-owned utility.

Installation of the project's 12 Siemens Gamesa 11MW turbines is slated to begin this summer and be completed in the fourth quarter.

Vineyard Wind 1, owned by the JV of Iberdrola-controlled Avangrid and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, is the first commercial scale US offshore wind array to be approved and enter construction. At 800MW, though, it will require two construction seasons before all 64 of its 13MW Haliade-X turbines supplied by GE Renewable Energy will be installed.