Block Island Wind Farm was the first commercial

offshore wind farm Offshore wind power or offshore wind energy is the generation of electricity through wind farms in bodies of water, usually at sea. There are higher wind speeds offshore than on land, so offshore farms generate more electricity per amount of ...

in the United States, located from

Block Island Block Island is an island in the U.S. state of Rhode Island located in Block Island Sound approximately south of the mainland and east of Montauk Point, Long Island, New York, named after Dutch explorer Adriaen Block. It is part of Washingto ...

Rhode Island Rhode Island (, like ''road'') is a U.S. state, state in the New England region of the Northeastern United States. It is the List of U.S. states by area, smallest U.S. state by area and the List of states and territories of the United States ...

in the

Atlantic Ocean The Atlantic Ocean is the second-largest of the world's five oceans, with an area of about . It covers approximately 20% of Earth's surface and about 29% of its water surface area. It is known to separate the " Old World" of Africa, Europe ...

. The five-turbine, 30 MW project was developed by Deepwater Wind, now Ørsted US Offshore Wind. Construction began in 2015 and in late summer 2016 five

Alstom Alstom SA is a French multinational corporation, multinational rolling stock manufacturer operating worldwide in rail transport markets, active in the fields of passenger transportation, signalling, and locomotives, with products including the A ...

Haliade 150-6MW turbines were erected. Operations were launched in December 2016. It is the largest project using

wind power in Rhode Island Wind power in Rhode Island is in the early stages of development. There are several small scale wind turbine projects in the state. As of December 2013 there were 11 turbines at 10 sites in the state. In 2014, Rhode Island had 9 MW of installed ...

Design and capacity

Block Island Wind Farm is a project of

Deepwater Wind Deepwater may refer to ocean water in the abyssal zone, hadal zone, or other deep ocean zones. Deepwater may also refer to: Entertainment * Deep Water (Highsmith novel), a 1957 a psychological thriller novel by Patricia Highsmith * ''Deepwate ...

located about southeast of Block Island. The project is expected to produce more than 125,000 megawatt hours of electricity annually. Power is transmitted from the turbines to the

electric grid An electrical grid is an interconnected network for electricity delivery from producers to consumers. Electrical grids vary in size and can cover whole countries or continents. It consists of:Kaplan, S. M. (2009). Smart Grid. Electrical Power ...

along a transmission

submarine power cable A submarine power cable is a transmission cable for carrying electric power below the surface of the water.Scarborough Beach in

Narragansett, Rhode Island Narragansett is a town in Washington County, Rhode Island, United States. The population was 14,532 at the 2020 census. However, during the summer months the town's population more than doubles to near 34,000. The town of Narragansett occupie ...

. The structures were designed by

Alstom Wind GE Offshore Wind is a joint venture with Alstom and a subsidiary of GE Renewable Energy, created in 2015 when most of that company's other electrical power and generation assets were acquired. GE's stake in the joint venture is 50 % plus 1 share. ...

, standing . They can withstand a Category 3 storm. The system connects New Shoreham, Rhode Island to the grid for the first time and allows it to cease using

diesel generator A diesel generator (DG) (also known as a diesel Genset) is the combination of a diesel engine with an electric generator (often an alternator) to generate electrical energy. This is a specific case of engine generator. A diesel compression-ig ...

s. Gulf Island Fabrication was interested in building the foundations.

Permits and funding

The Block Island Wind Farm was conceived as a larger project extending into neighboring

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to build a $1.5-billion, 385-megawatt wind farm in federal waters. The 100-turbine project could provide 1.3 terawatt-hours (TW·h) of electricity per year – 15 percent of all electricity used in the state. In 2009, the State of Rhode Island designated

to begin with pilot projects. In that year Deepwater signed an agreement with National Grid to sell the power from the wind farm off Block Island, at an initial price of 24.4¢/kW·h, with a guaranteed 3.5% annual increase. The permitting process for the project has been highly controversial, with the Rhode Island Public Utilities Commission (RIPUC) initially rejecting the agreement price with National Grid as being excessive to Rhode Island's electricity rate payers. However, after the

Rhode Island General Assembly The State of Rhode Island General Assembly is the state legislature of the U.S. state of Rhode Island. A bicameral body, it is composed of the lower Rhode Island House of Representatives with 75 representatives, and the upper Rhode Island Se ...

and Governor Carcieri changed the state law concerning the "commercial reasonability" of contract pricing, the RIPUC voted to approve the key contract. After continuing controversy and appeals, the

Rhode Island Supreme Court The Rhode Island Supreme Court is the court of last resort in the U.S. State of Rhode Island. The Court consists of a Chief Justice and four Associate Justices, all selected by the Governor of Rhode Island from candidates vetted by the Judicial N ...

ruled in July 2011 to uphold the RIPUC decision. Opponents of the project raised issue about the contract pricing with the United States Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) in August 2012, but FERC in October of the same year issued a decision that they would not act on the complaint. A total of nine reviews and permits from state federal agencies were acquired, the last in early May 2015. On May 11, 2015 a new complaint was filed with FERC alleging that the power purchase agreement with National Grid violates the Public Utilities Regulatory Policy Act of 1978 and further alleging that the RIPUC violated the Federal Power Act and the

Supremacy Clause The Supremacy Clause of the Constitution of the United States ( Article VI, Clause 2) establishes that the Constitution, federal laws made pursuant to it, and treaties made under its authority, constitute the "supreme Law of the Land", and thu ...

of the U.S. Constitution. However, Deepwater Wind maintains that there is no support for any of these claims and that FERC should promptly deny the new complaint in its entirety. While the wind turbines have been built in state waters southeast of Block Island, the transmission cable crosses federal waters in the Atlantic. A portion of the power is supplied directly to Block Island, off shore from the Rhode Island mainland and had some of the highest power rates in the country due to its local generation by small diesel powered generators. Deepwater Wind announced March 2015 that it had received funding in the amount of $290 million from mandated lead arrangers

Société Générale Société Générale S.A. (), colloquially known in English as SocGen (), is a French-based multinational financial services company founded in 1864, registered in downtown Paris and headquartered nearby in La Défense. Société Générale ...

of Paris, France and

KeyBank KeyBank, the primary subsidiary of KeyCorp, is a regional bank headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio, and is the only major bank based in Cleveland. KeyBank is one of the largest banks in the United States. Key's customer base spans retail, small b ...

National Association of Cleveland, Ohio. The farm design was verified in 2017.

Construction

In late 2014, Gulf Island Fabrication, Inc. began steel work construction at its Houma, Louisiana shipyard. The building phase would focus on the turbines' foundations (for platforms) to be pile-anchored to the ocean floor. On June 26, 2015, the first of the five foundations for the project began its move via barge from Louisiana. The turbines will be delivered later in 2015 and erected in place in 2016. Foundation assembly started in ProvPort in March 2016, with estimated commissioning in late 2016. GZA GeoEnvironmental provided the geotechnical design and consulting for the staging facility at the Port of Providence. The structures, designed by

, stand 600 ft (180 m) high and can withstand a Category 3 storm. 7] The foundations were designed by Louisiana-based Keystone Engineering Inc. to withstand a 1000-year storm. The foundations’ robust strength is the product of meticulous design processes and thorough engineering analysis performed by Keystone. While the four-pile jacket foundation is common for offshore oil and gas platforms, Block Island's jackets are engineered to handle additional loading and vibration from the spinning turbines Keystone's engineering team ran thousands of test simulations, repeating each calculation multiple times to ensure the design would hold up under various weather conditions and load scenarios. Altogether, nearly 10 million tests were completed. On March 9, 2015, French company

received final notication to begin fabrication of five Alstom Haliade 150 6 MW offshore wind turbines.

GE Wind Energy GE Wind Energy is a branch of GE Renewable Energy, a subsidiary of General Electric. The company manufactures and sells wind turbines to the international market. In 2018, GE was the fourth largest wind turbine manufacturer in the world. History ...

acquired

and Haliade production in November 2015. As of July 2016, the site was grid-connected, and towers and LM Wind Power blades were in the port of Providence. The Norwegian installation jack-up vessel was on its way to France to pick up the 400 tonne generators, as it was not able to pick them up from an easier US port due to the Jones Act. A test version of the direct-drive turbine is installed at

Østerild Wind Turbine Test Field Østerild Wind Turbine Test Field (alternatively Risø) is a facility managed by the DTU Risø Campus of the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) for testing of offshore wind turbines with a pinnacle height up to near Thisted-Østerild, Denmar ...

GE–Alstom 150-6MW nacelle at Østerild, 2017

The first turbine was erected in August 2016. On August 18, 2016,

CEO Jeffrey Grybowski announced Block Island Wind Farm was fully constructed. The wind farm commenced commercial operation in December 2016.

Operation

During a major winter storm in March 2017, the turbines functioned as designed, automatically cutting out when the wind speed reached , and after the wind speed had topped out at about , they resumed production again once the speed went below the cut-off threshold. The project also provided jobs for the state of Rhode Island, employing

welder In a broad sense, a welder is anyone, amateur or professional, who uses welding equipment, perhaps especially one who uses such equipment fairly often. In a narrower sense, a welder is a tradesperson who specializes in fusing materials togethe ...

s, workers during assembly of the wind turbines, and divers.

References

External links