| Focus on the USA
Vineyard Wind enters the construction phase
It’s been a long time coming, but the era of commercial scale offshore wind has finally arrived in the USA
Above: Groundbreaking ceremony to mark the start of onshore construction
Vineyard Wind 1, the USA’s first commercial- scale offshore wind farm, a 50:50 joint venture between Avangrid Renewables (part of the Iberdrola Group) and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, has finally entered the construction phase. A ground breaking ceremony to mark the start of onshore construction was held on 19 November at Covell’s Beach in Barnstable, the site where two export cables will make landfall and connect to the grid at a substation further inland on Cape Cod.
The 800 MW wind farm, to be located 15 miles off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, will employ 62 GE Haliade-X wind turbines, with an installed capacity of 13 MW each. GE was announced as the preferred turbine supplier for the project in December of 2020
“Many people have worked extremely hard to make today possible, a day where we turn forward thinking into action,” said Vineyard Wind CEO Lars T. Pedersen. “From the environmental and community activists to our elected leadership at the local, state and federal level, it’s taken all of us, pulling in the same direction and not being deterred by setbacks both large and small. By focusing on our ultimate goal – developing clean, cost-effective energy that will cut carbon pollution and create thousands of jobs in the process – we never lost sight of what mattered most, and we ultimately have a better project as a result.” “Vineyard Wind is on a par with the most ambitious offshore developments globally, including those developed by the Iberdrola Group. Not many countries have the ambition to launch their first project at [such] a scale”, said Ignacio Galán, chairman and CEO of Iberdrola and chairman of Avangrid.
Offshore construction is due to begin next year and the wind farm is expected to start delivering power in 2023.
Financial close was achieved in September. Working with nine banks (Bank of America, J.P. Morgan, BBVA, NatWest, Santander, Crédit Agricole, Natixis, BNP Paribas and MUFG Bank), $2.3 billion of senior debt was raised to finance the construction of the project.
Prysmian Group is designing, manufacturing and installing an HVAC export cable system for the wind farm composed of two 220 kV three- core cables utilising extruded XLPE insulation. The project requires a total of 134 km of power cables. Prysmian will also supply its PRY-CAM permanent cable monitoring systems. Jan De Nul Group, together with its subcontractor JDR Cable Systems, part of the TFKable Group, is supplying the 66 kV inter- array cables, totalling about 210 km, which will connect the 62 GE Haliade-X turbines to an offshore substation for transmission to the grid. “We are excited to be at the forefront of the emerging offshore renewables market in the US,” said Wouter Vermeersch, manager offshore cables at Jan De Nul Group. “In 2020, we successfully completed the foundation and turbine installation on the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind Project and we are looking forward to capitalising on the knowledge gained.”
Right: GE Haliade-X prototype, Rotterdam
www.modernpowersystems.com | November/December 2021 | 35
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