Governor And U.S. Secretary of Interior Extol Virtues Of Offshore Wind, Environmental and Economic, At Wainscott Ceremony On Friday

Governor Kathy Hochul and U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland on Friday exalted the promise of the offshore wind power industry as an environmental and economic boon at the ceremonial groundbreaking for South Fork Wind, the first offshore wind farm that will send power to New York to reach the construction phase.

In a standing-room-only full studio at LTV in Wainscott, flanked by other government officials and business leaders, the governor said that the offshore wind industry will help the state reduce its fossil fuels, drive billions of dollars in economic stimulus and create thousands of jobs in the state — justifying New York’s aggressive pursuit of offshore wind contracts.

“This is just the beginning. Think about it: We’re going to have 9,000 megawatts. That’ll supply 30 percent of New York State’s electricity needs — that’s 6 million homes,” she said, speaking to a room lined with television cameras and photographers from news agencies around the metro region.

“We have the most ambitious renewable energy plan, not the state, the nation. And I’m going to put a challenge out to the rest of the world: We’re coming after you. We believe in this — this is our future, and we are very bold and ambitious here.”

The South Fork Wind project itself, she claimed, will generate enough power to support up to 70,000 homes and will offset 6 million tons of carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, the equivalent of removing 60,000 cars from the road. “How about that for a metric we’re proud of,” she said.

The power agreement inked with LIPA in 2017 will cost Long Island ratepayers more than $2 billion over the 25-year life span of the project, at a per-kilowatt cost that is nearly triple what some other, much larger, subsequent wind farm projects will cost.

“It’s always more expensive to be the first,” the governor said. “Every new form of energy has some start-up costs, but you’ll eventually see costs come down.”

The South Fork Wind project calls for up to 12 turbines, each more than 600 feet tall, to be erected in the ocean about 30 nautical miles southeast of Montauk. The 130 megawatts of power the turbines will be capable of producing at their peak outputs will be sent to land through a 50-mile undersea cable, which will come ashore at Beach Lane in Wainscott. It will then run beneath two miles of town roads and another two miles of the LIRR right-of-way to the LIPA substation in Cove Hollow.

Hochul, like her predecessor, Andrew Cuomo, has championed the South Fork Wind project and several others the state has inked contracts for as a new horizon, both in the fight to reduce the burning of fossil fuels and as an economic resource for jobs and revenue for the state.

The state has pledged to procure at least 9,000 megawatts of electricity from offshore wind sources by 2035 and has already inked agreements for nearly 2,000 megawatts, including two other projects many times the size of South Fork Wind in the same stretch of ocean off Montauk and two more off Jones Beach.

The Biden administration has set an ambitious goal of having 30 gigawatts of electricity generated by offshore wind farms by 2030 and has spotlighted the waters of the New York Bight as one of the first major hubs. The U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management will hold an auction next week for more than 480,000 acres of seafloor for wind farm development.

“Today marks another momentous step in our work to create a robust and sustainable clean energy future,” Haaland said. “This project and others like it will promote the development of a robust domestic use supply chain of offshore wind and ensuring that these projects create good paying union jobs.”

Friday’s ceremony, at which the secretary and governor and other officials symbolically tossed shovelfuls of dirt piled on the front of the stage for the cameras, came as crews working for the project’s developers, Ørsted and Eversource, have begun digging test wells along town roads and cutting trees along the Long Island Rail Road tracks.

The construction plan had said the crews were expected to start cutting through the asphalt of Wainscott Northwest Road — the first real breaking of ground, a few hundred feet from the film studio where the ceremonial groundbreaking was held — this past week.

But after opponents of the Wainscott route pointed out to East Hampton Town officials last weekend that the contract with the town called for testing pits to be dug along the entire route before work begins, the trenching work is now not forecast to begin until the last week of the month at the earliest.

The Citizens for the Preservation of Wainscott, the residents group that has led a costly two-year campaign to derail the Wainscott cable route, issued a statement on Friday that they still have lingering concerns about soil contamination from chemicals emanating from Superfund sites at East Hampton Airport.

“We continue to support the move to renewable energy and celebrate the progress toward that goal,” the group said. “But we continue to have serious reservations regarding an infrastructure project that runs its cable through residential neighborhoods, and next to a PFAS Superfund site, particularly when better alternative sites were available. Our focus will continue to be on protecting our community.”

Fishermen and some environmentalists have decried the rush to erect hundreds of wind turbines on the shallow coastal plains south of Long Island and New England until more is known about the effects they will have on fish and marine mammal migrations.

Outside the event, a tiny gaggle of commercial fishing advocates gathered to voice their own concerns about the effects the project as a whole might have on fish migrations and other marine animal species. Bonnie Brady, the executive director of the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association, played a recording of undersea pile driving as she listed potential threats to marine life that she sees the wind farm posing.

“You don’t destroy the environment in order to save it,” Brady said. “It is going to devastate commercial fishing. It’s not just this first project, 12 turbines — they have 122 coming right behind it as part of Sunrise Wind. This is bad.”

Commercial fishermen have been the staunchest critics of offshore wind development, saying the vast arrays of turbines and electrical cable could change historic fish migration patterns and that the structures themselves pose a safety threat to vessels in bad weather. South Fork Wind re-drew the layout proposal to spread the turbines farther apart in deference to the safety concerns, but otherwise the fishermen’s objections have been largely muted.

South Fork Wind received final approval from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management last month. Construction is forecast to take a little less than two years, with the wind farm’s developers — the Danish energy corporation Ørsted and New England electrical utility Eversource — expected to come online in late 2023.

With the turbines sprouting over the horizon, the cable installation will be the only visible portion of the project locally. From now until mid-May, construction crews will be digging the trenches and school-bus-sized “vaults” along the town roads that will conceal the cable once it comes ashore. Work will halt for the summer.

When construction resumes next fall, the work will also shift to the horizontal drilling operation, based in the Beach Lane parking lot, that will bore a conduit beneath the beach and seafloor out to a point more than 1,500 feet from shore, where the cable will be pulled in to land.