Offshore

First US-made export cable installed at South Fork offshore wind farm

First US-made export cable installed at South Fork offshore wind farm
A rendering of the South Fork Wind substation, which will be built by Kiewit Offshore Services. South Fork Wind is the second commercial-scale offshore wind project to receive federal approval in the U.S. (Courtesy: Ørsted)

Nexans, a cable and optical fiber company, announced the successful installation and site acceptance testing of the export cable for Ørsted and Eversource’s South Fork Wind Farm in Long Island, NY – the first American made subsea cable that connects a US offshore wind farm to the electricity grid.

If the project – owned by Eversource and Ørsted – remains on track to be completed by the end of 2023, it would become America’s first utility-scale offshore wind farm to be completed in federal waters.

The 110km 138 kV high voltage alternative current subsea export cable will soon transmit 132MW of electricity to Long Island, New York, energizing over 70,000 homes. The South Fork Wind Farm contract is the first to be completed within a framework agreement between Nexans and Ørsted Wind Power North America LLC. In line with the same framework agreement, Nexans is currently manufacturing the cable for Ørsted and Eversource’s Revolution Wind Farm in Rhode Island, with installation scheduled for 2024.

Credit: Orsted

Nexans supplied and spliced the two export cable lengths running from the offshore substation to shore, performed the transition joint between the export and land cables, and installed the GIS terminations on the offshore substation. The cable was manufactured at Nexans’ facility in Charleston, South Carolina and the additional work was completed by local contractors, union workers, and Nexans specialists.

The project was approved by the Biden administration in late 2021. Construction began shortly after the project was cleared in early 2022. Eversource considered pulling out of its offshore wind partnership with Ørsted in 2022, citing record-setting U.S. lease auctions, but ultimately decided to continue after a strategic review.

Environmentalists had previously raised concerns about the endangered North Atlantic right whales, whose habitats and lives could be disturbed by the construction. South Fork Wind reached an agreement with the National Wildlife Federation, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Conservation Law Foundation in June 2022, in which Eversource and Ørsted committed to adopting monitoring to track whale locations, reducing noise created by pile driving, and implementing a 10-knot speed limit in the area to reduce the chance of vessel strikes.

Originally published in Power Grid International.

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