Sunrise Wind to build temporary piers at Smith Point County Park
Sunrise Wind plans to install two temporary piers, such as the one in the photo, at Smith Point County Park in Suffolk. Credit: Sunrise Wind
Sunrise Wind this week began construction of temporary piers at Smith Point County Park as part of an effort to ferry materials across the water to complete a 17.5-mile cable for the offshore wind farm.
Construction is expected to take about a month, said Sunrise Wind’s developer, Orsted of Denmark, in a weekly bulletin. The cable for the project will make landfall at Smith Point and continue up the William Floyd Parkway, eventually to the Long Island Expressway and a new cable receiver station in Holbrook.
The piers in coming months will be used by up to five barges to move more than 15 tons of equipment from a platform at the Smith Point Marina, Orsted said.
The cable infrastructure work is being done by Orsted contractor Haugland Group of Melville, which last year won a $200 million contract to build the 17.5-mile land-based cable and other land-based infrastructure for the project. Orsted has a state contract to build Sunrise Wind. Energy for the 924-megawatt project, enough to power hundreds of thousands of homes, will connect at the LIPA grid at a substation in Holbrook.
Orsted and New York State have refused to say how much the project will cost to build (Newsday has reported it's at least $4.2 billion), but have said it and another project under construction off Long Beach (with power destined for New York City) will increase customer bills across the state by an average of just over $2 a month.
As part of the work, a "jack-up vessel" will be situated about 1,300 feet off Smith Point's ocean beach starting in November, to begin work on infrastructure. The wind farm will be off the coast of Rhode Island/Massachusetts, about 30 miles northeast of Montauk Point. The jack-up barge will be in place through January, Orsted said. Local boaters are advised to keep a 100-yard clearance from the Orsted vessels.
Meaghan Wims, a spokeswoman for Sunrise Wind, said open access to Smith Point beaches and marina “will be maintained throughout the project.”
At the marina, she said, “the boat launch and parking area are fully accessible,” though one road has been closed to the public.
Wims said construction teams will complete a pier structure on the marina side first, then move to the Fire Island side to assemble a temporary pier there around mid-September. Both structures are scheduled to be completed by around the first week of October.
Orsted had been working with New England energy company Eversource until earlier this year, when Eversource announced it would divest its ownership and Orsted bought out its share.
Orsted is plowing ahead with Sunrise Wind despite a series of setbacks for the U.S. offshore wind industry, and Orsted’s projects in particular. The company has seen its share price tumble as it has taken a series of impairment charges of about $5 billion on U.S. projects, and abandoned two big projects planned for New Jersey.
But Orsted, which is the world's largest offshore wind developer and owns five-turbine Block Island Wind, also completed the first commercial-scale U.S. offshore wind farm with South Fork Wind, which was fully commissioned this summer. Its 12 turbines are now producing energy for the power-starved Hamptons.
Mark Harrington, a Newsday reporter since 1999, covers energy, wineries, Indian affairs and fisheries.
