For the first time in the United States, turbines are sending electricity to the grid from the sites of two large offshore wind farms.
The joint owners of the Vineyard Wind project, Avangrid and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, announced Wednesday the first electricity from one turbine at what will be a 62-turbine wind farm 15 miles (24 kilometers) off the coast of Massachusetts.
Five turbines are installed there. One turbine delivered about 5 megawatts of power to the Massachusetts grid just before midnight Wednesday. The other four are undergoing testing and should be operating early this year.
Danish wind energy developer Ørsted and the utility Eversource announced last month that their first turbine was sending electricity from what will be a 12-turbine wind farm, South Fork Wind, 35 miles (56 kilometers) east of Montauk Point, New York. Now, a total of five turbines have been installed there too.
Article says 1 turbine (5MW) from what will be a 62 turbine wind farm is sending power. The other farm will be 12 turbines (power per turbine not specified). If it’s 5MW for each of 74 turbines, that’s 370MW, not bad, but nowadays multi-GW solar installations are routine. I think there is currently around 1TW of solar deployed worldwide with 500+ GW/year coming online. Of course that’s not baseline power but still, it’s a much larger scale than this wind stuff, and many more TW are needed to displace fossil fuel.
In fairness, it wasn’t stated to be the maximum, just the amount delivered.
So, at the bottom it talks about an 800 megawatt wind farm that I think is the 62 turbine wind farm they’re referring to. That’s a peak of 12.9 megawatts per turbine.