America's First Offshore Wind Farm Came by Barge

Until 2016, Block Island made its own electricity. More than sixteen miles of open water separated it from the Rhode Island mainland, and nothing crossed that gap - no cable, no line, no connection. So the island burned diesel, up to 456,900 gallons a year. This is the story of America's first commercial offshore wind farm: five turbines, thirty megawatts, and the supply chain that had to exist before any of it could stand. The steel jackets were fabricated in Houma, Louisiana, then barged roughly 2,100 miles to Rhode Island - a voyage of about three weeks - because a law written in 1920 decides what may carry cargo between two American ports. Days after the first jacket went into the water in July 2015, a barge struck it and dented a leg; the foundation came back out, went to New Jersey for repair, and did not return to the seabed until mid-September. Each jacket was then pinned down with piles four and a half to five and a half feet across, driven about 250 feet into the seabed, and the whole structure was designed for a Category 3 hurricane. The power came home through 21.8 miles of 34.5-kilovolt submarine cable, buried with a jet plow and drilled in beneath the beaches at both ends - the first grid connection in the island's history. The result: electricity on Block Island about 40 percent cheaper, up to 456,900 gallons of diesel a year no longer burned, and roughly 120,000 megawatt-hours a year from five machines. Off Virginia, the successor project is building 2.6 gigawatts from 176 turbines - about eighty-seven times this one. Every figure in this film is sourced. The construction detail comes from the BOEM RODEO field observations on wind turbine foundation installation at the Block Island Wind Farm, and the cable and landfall detail from the US Army Corps of Engineers environmental assessment for the Block Island Wind Farm and Block Island Transmission System. Credits and licensing Moving footage: Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, RODEO program, via Wikimedia Commons. BOEM is a US federal agency, so these works are in the public domain in the United States; Commons carries them under CC BY-SA 2.0, and this release is attributed accordingly. Photographs: U.S. Department of Energy, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Narration: generated locally with Kokoro-82M v1.0, Apache-2.0. Music: Perspectives. Sound effects: channel library. This video reports documented engineering, construction and permitting facts. It takes no position on energy policy and names no political party.