Surfrider is encouraged by the completion of the South Fork Wind Project (Project), which consists of twelve, 11MW wind turbines and sits about 35 miles offshore of Montauk, NY.
The Eastern Long Island (ELI) Chapter of the Surfrider Foundation has a long history of analyzing, commenting, and finally supporting this project to try to reduce the major negative impacts to our ocean and coasts from climate change.
New York power authorities chose the Project as far back as 2017 as the cheapest way to deliver electricity to the South Fork of Long Island, beating out other proposals such as solar panels and methane gas burning. Construction began in February of 2022.
Orsted and Eversource, the two developers of the project, announced that the Project was complete on March 14, 2024 and that electricity was being delivered to the landside electricity grid, enough to power about 66,000 homes when operating at full capacity.
Surfrider worked for years to educate our members and the public with unbiased and credible information about the positive and negative impacts of the Project. The ELI Chapter hosted two public webinars, a public meeting with Orsted as a speaker, and ex Chair Andy Brosnan participated on a panel at the East Hampton library.
The ELI Chapter stayed neutral on the Project until the 2021 release of the environmental impact analysis as part of National Environmental Policy Act review requirements. They wanted to ensure that the Project met a high bar for environmental and recreational protection, mitigation, and monitoring before they could support it.
For example, Surfrider ensured that the power cable landing site on Beach Lane in Wainscott did not close the beach to recreational users during construction. We also joined many other groups asking for mitigation and protection measures for marine mammals, especially the North Atlantic Right Whale. The project developer had to comply with these measures, such as wildlife spotters on construction vessels, slow startup of pile driving equipment, seasonal restrictions on pile driving, and safety perimeters for marine mammals around the pile driving sites.
Surfrider strives to support renewable energy projects, as a way to reduce the negative impacts from climate change to our coasts and ocean. Read our policy on Renewable Ocean Energy for more details on how we evaluate projects like South Fork Wind.