Tag Archives: wind turbines

The First Turbine of the South Fork Wind Farm is Spinning!

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Yesterday, Dec. 7th 2023, we visited the newly operational first turbine of the South Fork Wind Farm. It is also a first for New York State. It was an amazing event covered by news reporters from Reuters, CBS, NY Times, Newsday, East Hampton Star and more, with State officials from Albany, and local political figures from East Hampton and Long Island, also including NYSERDA, LIPA, PSEG, etc.,.  Jen Garvey of Orsted ran the show, competent as always.

The star of the event was the first operational turbine which is already transmitting electricity to East Hampton!  As Judith Hope puts it:

We celebrated “First Power” today when the first wind turbine, 35 files off the Montauk coast, was turned on and began transmitting electricity to the Cove Hollow substation!  Eleven more turbines are on the way and together they will provide electric power to 70,000 South Fork homes. It was so satisfying to come home tonight and to hit the light switch knowing that it is even partially fueled by our own offshore wind. Very soon, the South Fork Wind Farm will be entirely powering our homes. Happy Holidays!
Judith 

There follows a ‘slide show’ from our visit to the wind farm aboard our vessel, the “Julia Leigh.”  Missing is a picture of an uninvited guest spouting off: a whale just about 100 yards from our ship, swimming among the wind turbines and construction vessels, and joining the party, in celebration it seems!

To understand the construction site for the wind farm, I found this quite useful:

HOW TO BUILD AN OFFSHORE WIND FARM

(1) The first operational wind turbine:

(2) Concrete foundation for a future turbine.  Penetrates the sea bed floor about 60 feet:

(3) A “lift boat”.  A platform from which the turbine and blades are mounted onto the foundation. The 3 blades are visible on the platform waiting to be mounted next.   

(4) The “switch station”: this is where the electricity from the turbines is transformed to a higher voltage and then loaded on to the cable which runs along the sea bed and eventually makes landfall in Wainscott.  Also shown is a transport vessel for construction material from the mainland supply port. It can house 40 construction workers who spend 2-week shifts working on the wind farm.

(5) The crowd watching from our boat!

(6) The wind farm construction site from a distance:

Wind Turbines Are Not Killing Fields for Birds

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Sep 3, 2019, from STATISTA

President Trump continues his years’ long dispute with wind turbines, claiming that wind turbines diminish home property values, cause cancer, and “kill all the birds.”

Wind turbines have not been found to diminish home values of nearby properties or cause cancer. According to numbers aggregated by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, cats are a bigger scrooge to the overall bird community than wind turbines. The most recent estimate places the number of bird deaths at the paws of cats at 2.4 billion. Collisions from wind turbines on land killed a small fraction of birds in comparison to the damage that cats and glass buildings cause to the general bird population. Land wind turbines were responsible for over 200,000 bird deaths while collisions from building glass are estimated to be responsible for nearly 600 million bird deaths. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service did not provide estimates for deaths resulting from offshore wind turbines.

As the wind power industry grows and expands, the renewable’s relationship to its environment is coming under more intense scrutiny. While the relationship between wind turbines and different types of bird populations, particularly apex birds, is understudied, there is some evidence that turbines can hurt those populations. Hawaii, home to many endangered species, has taken extra steps to protect species that could be vulnerable to wind energy. The state requires all potential wind projects on both private and public land to have permits and conservation plans for the bird and bat population. Hawaii also documents animal mortality data from independent, third-party experts, with some wind farms subjected to steep fines for killing any federally protected birds.

As wind turbines become more common, reforms in this spirit could help alleviate some of the drawbacks of the new energy source.

Infographic: Wind Turbines Are Not Killing Fields for Birds | Statista