Vineyard Wind 1, scheduled to partially open later this year is the first commercial-scale wind farm in the U.S.
Vineyard Wind 1 is an offshore wind farm being constructed about 13 nautical miles (24 kilometers or 15 miles) south of Martha’s Vineyard, near Cape Cod in Massachusetts.
Vineyard Wind 1 is being built by Vineyard Wind LLC, a 50-50 joint venture between Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners and Avangrid Renewables. The latter is a subsidiary of Avangrid which is 81.5 percent owned by Iberdrola, a major utility headquartered in Spain.
The array will include 62 wind turbines with a capacity of 804 MW, enough power for about 400,000 homes. The Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities approved the project in 2019 and construction began in November 2021.
Another project, South Fork Wind, is scheduled to start construction this summer off the coasts of New York and Rhode Island. However, it’s smaller than Vineyard Wind, according to the Associated Press.
The US is decades behind Europe where the first offshore wind farm was erected in 1991. As of the beginning of 2022, there were 123 offshore wind farms in Europe, supplying 28,363 MW in grid-connected capacity.
Vineyard Wind CEO Klaus Skoust Moeller said New Bedford is the cradle of large-scale offshore wind in the United States, and this wind farm sets the stage for the next project, and the next, and the next.
“I’m really looking forward to seeing that first turbine out there in the sunlight,” he said. “For me, that’s a moment of many things coming together.”
