U.S. offshore wind farm breaks ground at Block Island for the first time

Story: 2015 C.E.  |  Last updated: January 1, 2015

On a patch of Atlantic Ocean floor 3.8 miles southeast of Block Island, Rhode Island, workers began preparing the seabed for something the United States had never seen before: a commercial offshore wind farm. It was 2015 C.E., and after years of permitting battles, legal challenges, and engineering simulations numbering in the millions, the country’s first offshore wind project was finally moving from blueprint to reality.

Key facts

• U.S. offshore wind farm: The Block Island Wind Farm consists of five Alstom Haliade 150 turbines, each rated at 6 megawatts, producing a combined 30 MW — enough to generate more than 125,000 megawatt-hours of electricity annually.
• Offshore construction timeline: Steel foundation work began at a Houma, Louisiana shipyard in late 2014 C.E., and the first foundation began its barge journey to Rhode Island on June 26, 2015 C.E. — marking the physical start of construction at sea.
• Grid connection cable: Power travels from the turbines through a 21-mile submarine cable buried under the Atlantic Ocean floor, making landfall near Scarborough Beach in Narragansett, Rhode Island — the longest buried offshore power cable in the U.S. at the time.

Why it took so long to get here

The road to 2015 C.E. was anything but smooth. Deepwater Wind, the project’s developer, had been working toward this moment since at least 2009 C.E., when Rhode Island designated it to begin pilot offshore wind development. What followed was a years-long maze of regulatory fights.

The Rhode Island Public Utilities Commission initially rejected the power purchase agreement with National Grid, calling the price — 24.4 cents per kilowatt-hour — excessive for ratepayers. The state legislature and governor changed the law to allow approval. Opponents then appealed to the Rhode Island Supreme Court, which upheld the contract in 2011 C.E. Additional complaints were filed with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in 2012 C.E. and again in May 2015 C.E., just as construction was beginning. Deepwater Wind dismissed both.

Nine separate permits from state and federal agencies were required before a single foundation could move. The last permit arrived in early May 2015 C.E.

Engineering a first

The turbines — each standing 600 feet tall — were designed to withstand a Category 3 hurricane. But the foundations holding them to the seafloor required an entirely different kind of engineering. Louisiana-based Keystone Engineering Inc. designed four-pile jacket foundations, a structure borrowed from offshore oil and gas platforms, and then adapted it to handle the continuous vibration and dynamic loading that spinning wind turbines produce. The team ran nearly 10 million test simulations before finalizing the design.

That borrowing from oil and gas expertise was no accident. Louisiana offshore service providers played a central role in making the project possible. Gulf Island Fabrication built the steel foundations in Houma. Falcon Global’s lift barge “The Robert” traveled roughly 2,000 miles from Louisiana to Block Island over 14 days to assist with offshore installation. The energy transition, at least here, was built in part by workers whose careers had been shaped by fossil fuel infrastructure.

Financing for the $290 million project came from two mandated lead arrangers: Société Générale of Paris and KeyBank National Association of Cleveland, Ohio — a transatlantic financial partnership that reflected both the novelty and the ambition of the undertaking.

What it meant for Block Island

Block Island, also known as New Shoreham, had never been connected to the mainland power grid. Its electricity came entirely from diesel generators — noisy, polluting machines that fouled the air and cost residents some of the highest electricity rates in the country. The wind farm’s 21-mile submarine cable would connect the island to the grid for the first time in its history.

When the turbines finally came online in December 2016 C.E., residents noticed the silence first. The generators were gone. Soot that had been dirtying curtains stopped accumulating. Birdsong returned. And electricity costs dropped by roughly one-third. For a small island community, those were not abstract environmental benefits — they were immediate and daily.

Lasting impact

Block Island Wind Farm did not generate much electricity in the national context. Thirty megawatts is a small fraction of U.S. power capacity. What it generated instead was proof: that offshore wind was buildable in American waters, that the engineering could handle Atlantic conditions, that the permits could be won, and that communities could benefit directly.

That proof mattered. The years after 2015 C.E. saw a wave of offshore wind development proposals along the U.S. East Coast — projects measuring in the hundreds and eventually thousands of megawatts. Deepwater Wind itself was acquired by Ørsted, the Danish energy company that had pioneered offshore wind in Europe, and rebranded as Ørsted US Offshore Wind. The U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management expanded its offshore wind lease program substantially in the years following. By the early 2020s C.E., the U.S. had committed to 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030 C.E. — a goal that traces at least part of its lineage to five turbines off a small Rhode Island island.

The project also demonstrated a model: that offshore wind development could double as grid infrastructure for underserved or isolated communities. That lesson has since informed proposals for island and coastal communities in other parts of the country and the world.

Blindspots and limits

The Block Island Wind Farm was not without complications. By 2021 C.E., four of the five turbines had been taken offline for at least two months due to turbine stress fatigue and erosion that exposed the underwater transmission cables — problems that raised real questions about maintenance costs and long-term durability for offshore infrastructure in harsh Atlantic conditions. The power purchase agreement that made the project financially viable also locked Rhode Island ratepayers into electricity prices with a guaranteed 3.5% annual increase, a tradeoff that generated controversy throughout the approval process and beyond.

The project also relied heavily on foreign vessels and equipment — including a Norwegian jack-up installation ship and French-manufactured turbines — because U.S. maritime law, specifically the Jones Act, restricts the use of foreign-flagged vessels in domestic waters, a constraint that added logistical complexity and cost. Building a robust domestic offshore wind supply chain remained an unresolved challenge for the U.S. industry long after Block Island’s turbines started turning.

Read more

For more on this story, see: Block Island Wind Farm — Wikipedia

For more from Good News for Humankind, see:

• Renewables now make up at least 49% of global power capacity
• Indigenous land rights recognized for 160 million hectares at COP30
• The Good News for Humankind archive on renewable energy

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