The giant parts for wind turbines await pickup at a pier in New London, Conn. Joe Buglewicz for The New York Times

Wind has always been there for the taking in so many places, the challenges of nimbyism notwithstanding. Now the turbines are arriving to harness it for the New York metropolitan area. Our thanks to Patrick McGeehan and the New York Times for sharing the story:

Huge Turbines Will Soon Bring First Offshore Wind Power to New Yorkers

Parts of what will eventually be the towers of wind turbines out in the ocean. Joe Buglewicz for The New York Times

New York’s best bet for entering the era of offshore wind power is stacked up at the water’s edge in Connecticut.

The pier on the Connecticut coast is filled with so many massive oddities that it could be mistaken for the set of a sci-fi movie. Sword-shaped blades as long as a football field lie stacked along one edge, while towering yellow and green cranes hoist giant steel cylinders to stand like rockets on a launchpad.

It is a launching point, not for spacecraft, but for the first wind turbines being built to turn ocean wind into electricity for New Yorkers. Crews of union workers in New London, Conn., are preparing parts of 12 of the gargantuan fans before shipping them out for final assembly 15 miles offshore.

“They’re sort of space-stationesque,” said Christine Cohen, a Democratic state senator who toured the assembly site last week. “Seeing the components up close, it’s just breathtaking how immense they are.”

The turbines will make up South Fork Wind, a wind farm in the Atlantic Ocean whose completion is pivotal to Northeastern states’ hopes of switching to renewable sources of energy. Recent setbacks to several other offshore projects in the region have raised concerns about whether and when they all will be built.

One of South Fork’s developers, Denmark-based Orsted, recently canceled plans for two much larger wind farms off the coast of New Jersey, saying they were no longer feasible.

The company had also planned to build Sunrise Wind, another wind farm in the Atlantic that would supply electricity to New York. But after state regulators refused to increase the subsidies for that project and three others, Orsted said it was unsure whether it would bid again for that contract. New York officials said they would seek new bids starting Nov. 30.

In the meantime, New York’s best bet for entering the era of offshore wind power is stacked up at the water’s edge in New London.

The pieces are so big that it has taken a cargo ship three voyages to transport them from Germany and Denmark, where they were made by Siemens Gamesa, a leading manufacturer of turbines. The ship is due back soon with the last load…

Read the whole article here.