East Hampton Town officials, along with their counterparts from Suffolk County and New York State, were in a celebratory mood on Dec. 6 at Town Hall, where they toasted the clean, renewable electricity that last week began flowing from the South Fork Wind farm through 78 miles of underwater cable to a Long Island Power Authority substation in East Hampton.
Two of the wind farm’s 12 turbines had been installed, with a third under construction last week. Construction is expected to be completed “in just a matter of weeks,” said David Hardy, Orsted’s chief executive officer of the Americas. Orsted, a Danish energy company, is constructing the wind farm in partnership with Eversource Energy.
The understanding that a historic moment had arrived was felt throughout the main meeting room at Town Hall, as one speaker after another emphasized the immensity of the challenge to plan, design, and construct such an installation far offshore, navigate federal, state, and local permitting and review, and overcome strenuous opposition from some quarters.
“I am grateful and excited to be a part of building New York’s first offshore wind farm, which is also the nation’s first commercial offshore wind farm being built in federal waters,” Mr. Hardy said. “It’s a huge accomplishment, not just for East Hampton or for New York, but for this country. And I also truly and sincerely feel it’s important because renewable energy is so critical to our future — not just our climate ambitions, but also for the jobs that will come with it.”
The celebration happened during the 28th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or COP 28, in the United Arab Emirates, in a year that has seen manifestations of climate change throughout the world, and against the backdrop of ever-more-dire warnings that fossil-fuel emissions must be sharply and rapidly reduced.
“We’re standing at an important moment in time,” Mr. Hardy said. “In order to stave off the most serious impacts of climate change, a wholesale transition to our energy system must take place, and offshore wind is going to be critical to that energy future.”
The following day, many of those officials were among a group that sailed from Greenport to the wind farm, about 35 miles off Montauk Point, where one turbine was spinning as construction of the nation’s first commercial-scale offshore wind farm continued. En route, Julia Bovey, Eversource’s director of external affairs for offshore wind, touted the first substation and export cable for an offshore wind farm built in the United States.
“We have to commit to these to get the supply chain going,” she said of the nascent domestic offshore wind industry. “If there’s no first, there’s never going to be a second and a third.”
It has been nearly a decade since then-Supervisor Larry Cantwell “started us on a path of being the first municipality to commit to reaching 100-percent renewable energy consumption by 2030,” Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc said at Town Hall. “Transitioning away from fossil fuels, we know, is important in order to address climate change and sea level rise. As a coastal community, we are particularly and acutely aware of that fact.”
In remarks at Town Hall, Ms. Bovey reached further back in time. With Superstorm Sandy in 2012, “Long Island had a front-row seat to what we were going to be seeing for sea level rise. From a distance, I saw this community rally around that and say we are going to be a place that’s going to be part of shaping our own destiny.”
It was in 2019 that then-Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, which set a goal of nine gigawatts of offshore wind by 2035.
“It certainly takes courage to establish goals like New York’s offshore wind goal,” said Doreen Harris, president and C.E.O. of the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, or NYSERDA. “We certainly recognize it takes courage to look out into the open ocean and say, ‘We’re going to install nine gigawatts of offshore wind by 2035,’ and I would say that that is just the beginning.” South Fork Wind, she said, represents “a major down payment on that goal.”
LIPA’s board approved South Fork Wind in 2016, said Tom Falcone, the utility’s C.E.O. “We’re here celebrating the first offshore wind turbine, but the first of thousands,” he said. “What’s happened subsequently is under the leadership of our governor and Doreen Harris, who’s tremendous, and NYSERDA, our colleagues, we have a whole new infrastructure that’s coming, so much so that by 2030 we forecast we’ll get about half of our energy on Long Island from offshore wind.”
“It’s no accident that this first project happened in the Town of East Hampton,” Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. said. “It’s not just that you’re sticking out in the ocean, but that helped. But East Hampton has always been a leader on the East End, and on Long Island, and New York State. Whether it was affordable housing, open space preservation, protecting the environment, they’ve been a leader.”
Adrienne Esposito, executive director of Citizens Campaign for the Environment, said that “as the turbine blades turn, so does a page in New York history, where we begin a new chapter on New York being a leader, and East Hampton being the leader on fighting climate change,” which would also promote “cleaner air, a safer environment, protecting what it is we love about where we live, and creating a new industry, which we call the ‘windustry.’ ”
Many speakers referred to the effort to overcome opposition to the project, largely from commercial fishermen and some Wainscott property owners, who attempted to force a vote to incorporate an expanse of the hamlet in order to thwart the plan to land the wind farm’s export cable at an ocean beach at the end of Beach Lane. In one effort, opponents held a gathering at the beach, where they warned that offshore wind farms would spell the extinction of the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale. Their picket signs depicted a breaching humpback whale.
Judith Hope, who 50 years ago was the first woman elected supervisor here and more recently led the Win With Wind advocacy group, said that “the opposition was well connected [and] exceedingly well funded. . . . I’m proud to say that Win With Wind met the opposition toe to toe.”
“It was never going to be easy,” Mr. Hardy said, “but this community’s perseverance, determination, and efforts are going to be memorialized in the history books.”
Last Thursday, as the vessel idled at the South Fork Wind farm before turning back toward Greenport, passengers were delighted at the site of a whale, apparently unbothered by the 12 monopile foundations and construction vessels nearby.
