Revolution Wind offshore wind project gains US approval

On Aug. 22, Ørsted (Fredericia, Denmark) and Eversource’s (Boston, Mass., U.S.) Revolution Wind offshore wind project, located about 15 nautical miles southeast of Point Judith in Rhode Island, was approved by the U.S. Department of Interior. It will have an estimated capacity of 704 megawatts (MW); under state agreements, the project will deliver 400 MW to Rhode Island and 304 MW to Connecticut and power nearly 250,000 homes.

The commercial-scale offshore wind energy project joins the Vineyard Wind project in Massachusetts, the South Fork Wind project in Rhode Island and New York and the Ocean Wind 1 project in New Jersey, bringing the current U.S. pipeline of projects approved for construction to 2.7 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind energy. According to an analysis by the Business Network for Offshore Wind (Baltimore, Md., U.S.), more than 13 GW of projects await final environmental review. Approval of this fourth project also brings the U.S. closer to its goal of approving 16 environmental reviews before 2025.

“The U.S. offshore wind industry is on the move; the steady stream of offshore wind project environmental reviews is critical to the success of supply chain investments, and [this] announcement bolsters investments in component production at ProvPort in Rhode Island, cable manufacturing in South Carolina, steel fabrication in western New York, and shipbuilding in Texas and Louisiana,” notes Liz Burdock, founder and CEO of the Business Network for Offshore Wind.

As reported by the Rhode Island Coastal Resources Management Council,  Revolution Wind will have up to 100 offshore wind turbines. Sixty five of those will be SG 11.0-200 DD wind turbines supplied, delivered and installed by Siemens Gamesa (Zamudio, Spain). These wind turbines feature 97-meter blades.

Since the current U.S. administration took office, companies have announced 18 offshore wind shipbuilding projects as well as investments of nearly $3.5 billion across 12 manufacturing facilities and 13 ports to strengthen the U.S. offshore wind supply chain, representing thousands of new jobs.