The same week that New York announced that the Indian Point Nuclear Reactor would be shut down, Gov. Cuomo announced that the largest offshore wind project in the US would be built off the coast of Long Island.  This new wind farm will help offset the loss of nuclear power, while eventually providing power to more than 1 million NY homes.

In a stunning development for clean energy in New York State, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced today that New York plans to build enough offshore wind capacity by 2030 to power 1.25 million New York homes, starting with a 90-megawatt project 30 miles off Montauk on Long Island’s South Fork.

This new commitment to 2400 megawatts (MW) of offshore wind power came in his Long Island regional State of the State speech one day after he announced that the troubled Indian Point nuclear facility in Westchester County will close by 2021 and that the state plans to replace its power with clean energy and low-carbon energy resources.

With today’s announcement, New York State will become the nation’s leader on clean, offshore wind power.

The South Fork Offshore Wind Farm

The 90 MW South Fork offshore wind project would supply electricity to 50,000 South Fork homes, helping to meet peak demand in the area and would, via an underwater cable, deliver electricity directly to East Hampton to help the town meet its forward-looking plan to get 100 percent of its electricity from clean sources by 2030.

The Long Island Power Authority (LIPA)’s South Fork project, the start of something really big in New York, has several noteworthy aspects. It will be sited 30 miles from land, and therefore not visible from shore, avoiding any possible complaints about visual impacts. Also, because Deepwater Wind, the project developer, already owns the lease for the wind energy area where it wants to build the project, the company now has the essentials it needs for offshore wind development: a site, a lease, and a long-term contract, vastly increasing the likelihood that this project will come to fruition. (Deepwater is also the developer of the country’s first offshore wind power project, the 30-megawatt Block Island Wind Farm, located off the Rhode Island coast, which came online in December.) Of course, the project will still need to go through federal and state permitting and environmental review processes before the company gets the go-ahead to put steel in the water.

Read the rest at NRDC.org