The Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management recently approved the 1,100-megawatt Ocean Wind 1 project off the New Jersey coast.
The announcement is the third commercial-scale, offshore wind energy project in the United States approved by the BOEM, joining the Vineyard Wind project offshore Massachusetts and the South Fork Wind project offshore of Rhode Island and New York, which are both under construction.
The Ocean Wind project, about 13 nautical miles southeast of Atlantic City, was originally developed by New Jersey’s Public Service Enterprise Group and Danish multinational company Orsted, which became the sole owner of the project in January 2023 when it bought out PSEG’s 25 percent stake.
The developers were selected for the project through a New Jersey Board of Public Utilities solicitation in June 2019.
The wind project calls for deployment of up to 98 wind turbines, up to three offshore substations, inter-array cables linking the individual wind turbines to the offshore substations, and substation interconnector cables linking the substations to each other.
The project also calls for development of up to three offshore export cables, installed in two export cable route corridors, to connect to onshore export cable systems and two onshore substations with connections to New Jersey’s electrical grid at BL England and Oyster Creek. The BL England export cable route corridor will make landfall in Ocean City, New Jersey. The Oyster Creek export cable route corridor will make landfall in Lacey Township, New Jersey.
Onshore construction work for the project is expected to begin by the end of 2023, with offshore construction beginning in 2024 and the project online by 2025.
Orsted plans to use GE Renewable Energy’s 12-MW Haliade-X offshore wind turbine, one of the largest in the world. General Electric says the Haliade-X stands 260 meters high with a rotor diameter of 220 meters and blade lengths of 107 meters, which enable the turbine to operate consistently through a range of wind speeds, giving the turbine a capacity factor rating of about 60 percent.
The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection approved Ocean Wind I in April 2023. The project is expected to contribute to New Jersey’s goal of having 11 gigawatts of offshore wind energy by 2040 as called for in the Governor’s Executive Order No. 307, issued in September 2022.
New Jersey’s Energy Master Plan calls for the state to achieve 100 percent clean energy by 2050.
