New York’s offshore wind industry is back, or at least back in contract. Two offshore wind projects, Empire Wind 1 and Sunrise Wind, were awarded, respectively, to developers Equinor and the partnership of Orsted and Eversource. These two projects, which would amount to 1,700 megawatts of capacity in total (enough to power about a million homes, according to Governor Kathy Hochul’s office), had first been bid out in 2019 and then rebid when these same developers were unable to renegotiate their contracts to deal with rising material and interest rate costs.
Last year was an annus horribilis for the offshore wind industry, with projects cancelled up and down the East Coast and billions of dollars of losses for offshore wind developers. The delayed and cancelled projects have called into question the viability of the Biden administration’s ambitious goal of installing 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030.
This year, however, has seen some signs of recovery. For years, the U.S. offshore wind industry was a bunch of plans and a few dozen megawatts of capacity from wind farms off the coasts of Rhode Island and Virginia. Then came Vineyard Wind 1, off the coast of Massachusetts, which started delivering power early this year, shortly after another New York project, South Fork Wind, started up in December of last year.
But merely (re-)awarding the contracts does not ensure that steel goes into the water, let alone that electrons flow into homes. Sunrise Wind will likely be completed in 2026, according to Orsted. Before that the Danish company has to hammer out the details of a new contract, and only then finally decide whether to go through with the thing or not; that’s expected to happen sometime in the second quarter of this year, with federal permitting finished in the summer. Empire Wind 1 has a similar timeline.
According to the governor’s office, utility customers will feel these contracts to the tune of an extra $2 a month. When the projects were first bid out in 2019, the expected impact on utility bills was just $0.73.
