Ørsted, GE announce plans for wind farms off U.S. coast

Oct 7, 2019 by Triton Staff

Danish renewable energy company Ørsted has announced plans to build two wind farms in U.S. waters off the coasts of Maryland and New Jersey using the Haliade-X 12MW, billed as the world’s most powerful wind turbine. 

The 12-megawatt, 853-foot (260m) turbines are built by General Electric Co. Each 721-foot (220m) rotor is more than twice the length of a soccer pitch, and the turbine blades, at 351 feet (107m), are so long that maker LM Wind Power, a division of GE Renewable Energy, built a massive factory on the Atlantic coast in Cherbourg, France, to help in transporting them from the plant to a cargo ship, according to GE.

Wind farm Skipjack, to be built off the coast of Maryland, is expected to be launched in 2022 with a capacity of 120 megawatts, while the larger Ocean Wind, to be built off the coast of New Jersey, is expected to come online in 2024 with the capacity to generate 1,100 megawatts – the equivalent of an average nuclear reactor, according to the GE website. By comparison, the world’s first offshore wind farm, built a mile off the Danish coast by Ørsted in 1991, had a generating capacity of 5 megawatts.

“We look forward to introducing the next-generation offshore wind turbine to the market,” stated Martin Neubert, executive vice president and CEO of Ørsted Offshore, in a GE company news article. “Today, offshore wind is a competitive source of homegrown clean energy that can help countries and states achieve their climate targets while creating long-lasting economic activity.”

GE wind turbines also power the first offshore wind farm in the U.S., the 30-megawatt Block Island Wind Farm off the coast of Rhode Island, which runs on Haliade 150-6MW units. According to the company, seven states on the East Coast of the U.S. have committed to building enough offshore wind farms to generate a total capacity of 20 gigawatts by 2035. 

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