New York has advanced four new wind farm projects upstate as well as a transmission line that will deliver energy to the state’s grid from a proposed offshore wind farm, which will add a total of nearly 1.5 GW and almost 1 GW in offshore power alone as the state aims for a 2035 goal of 9 GW in that sector.
On Thursday, the New York state Public Service Commission said in a release that it had approved compliance filings for four “major” wind farms upstate that represent a total of 573.6 MW, adding that this approval was one of the last remaining steps before the farms can become operational.
Gov. Kathy Hochul, D, announced in a same-day release that the commission had also approved a 25-mile transmission line that would deliver electricity from a proposed offshore wind farm to an existing substation in Suffolk County.
The 924-MW proposed farm, the Sunrise Wind Project, would be located in the New York Bight. The release states that construction should begin in 2023 and developers expect that it “will be fully operational by 2025.”
“The proposed Sunrise Wind farm located in federal waters is the largest offshore wind farm yet that would be connected to New York's electric grid,” Hochul said in the release.
She added that the project has “the potential capacity to power nearly 600,000 homes” and will be developed by Eversource along with the Danish power company Ørsted, which will receive support from ConEd and the New York Power Authority in delivering this energy to the state’s grid.
Sunrise Wind was selected by New York during its 2018 solicitation, and the area’s leaser, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, completed scoping on the potential impacts of the project in 2021, a few months after the Biden administration announced its goal to deploy 30 GW of offshore wind energy by 2030.
New York’s Climate Leadership and Community Act established a 2030 deadline for the state to reach 70 percent clean energy generation and a 2035 deadline for reaching 9 GW of offshore wind.
The Public Service Commission’s release notes that the four new upstate wind farms are among 18 renewable energy projects that the state’s Board on Electric Generation Siting and the Environment has approved so far, with those projects in total expected to deliver more than 2,510 MW.
In a separate development, BOEM announced Wednesday that it has identified eight potential new offshore wind energy areas in the Central Atlantic that collectively encompass 1.7 million acres off the shores of North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland and Delaware. BOEM will take comments on this finding through Dec. 16.
