Developer Equinor has tapped cabling giant Prysmian to supply the interarray lines for its giant 816MW Empire Wind offshore wind power project in the US Atlantic.
Under the deal, the contractor will deliver around 150km of high-voltage 66kV lines capable of handling output from turbines with a nameplate of 10-15MW for the development off New York state, with fabrication of the cable system's power-cores set to begin this month.
“This agreement marks an important step forward in the development of Empire Wind and will allow us to transport twice as much power over a single interarray cable as current industry [with 33kV systems],” said Christer af Geijerstam, president of Equinor Wind US.
Hakan Ozmen, Prysmian’s executive vice president for its projects business unit, stated: “We are proud to support Equinor in this important challenge, providing North American power grids with our cables, expertise and cutting-edge technologies able to support the clean energy transition in the US.”
The Empire Wind cable system, being manufactured at Prysmian’s centres of excellence in Montereau, France, and Nordenham, Germany, is slated for completion in the summer of 2022 with installation to follow “in 2023 or 2024”.
Empire Wind, located on a 79,350-acre site off the southern coast of Long Island, has the potential to generate as much as 1GW of power once developed, marking it as key to the state’s plans to transition to clean-energy production.
The project is set to come online in 2024, at a calculated all-in development cost of $83.36/MWh.
Prysmian did not specify which of its fleet of cable-lay vessels would be sailed out for the Empire Wind job, but its newest unit, the Leonardo da Vinci, is on track for a 2021 launch, with construction ongoing at Var’s shipyard in Tulcea, Romania.
New York State governor Andrew Cuomo aims to put the state on a trajectory to achieve a zero-carbon emissions electricity sector by 2040, as well stoking renewable energy investment of almost $3bn via 46 large-scale renewable projects and creating more than 150,000 jobs in New York's clean energy industry.
