Construction Activities

The first offshore construction season is complete for America’s first offshore wind farm, with all five steel jacket foundations fully installed at the Block Island Wind Farm site. Construction crews installed the last deck platform on November 21, 2015. Over the course of the busy 18-week construction period, approximately 200 workers (100 of them local) and a dozen construction and transport barges, tugboats, crew ships and monitoring vessels were active at the project’s port facilities and the wind farm site roughly three miles off the coast of Block Island.

Installation of the four inter-array cables connecting the five wind turbine foundations and the export cable connecting the wind farm to a new substation on Block Island was completed summer 2016.

Our focus now is on offshore turbine installation. The final blade on the first offshore wind turbine for the Block Island Wind Farm was installed on August 4, 2016. Installation is expected to take roughly one month. After installation is complete, technicians will commission the wind turbines, a process that will start during offshore installation and take several months. The wind farm will be in commercial operations once commissioning is complete.

Offshore Construction - Information for Mariners

For more information about current offshore construction activities, where we are working, types of vessels being used, and activity outlooks, visit dwwind.com/information-for-mariners.