The Melville-based Haugland Energy Group has won the first construction contract for the South Fork Wind Farm. Developers Orsted and Eversource said the company will build the 4-mile underground cable and connect the state’s first offshore wind farm to an electrical substation in East Hampton.
South Fork Wind Farm’s final permits are expected to be just days away and construction is set to begin next month, according to Ken Bowes, the head of offshore wind siting and permitting for Eversource. Representatives from both developers held a roundtable discussion with environmental groups and residents last week.
“Our main goal here is to leave the conditions better than we found them, which means repaving the streets, reseeding the areas adjacent to the streets, and really making sure that residences are comfortable with where we've left everything at the end of construction,” Bowes said.
The project has faced heavy opposition from residents in Wainscott who don’t want the cable to come ashore in their neighborhood.
“It's taken a huge amount of leadership on the part of the community there to embrace this project, to support some of the real estate rights that we need in order to bring this project to fruition,” Orsted spokesperson Jennifery Garvey said. “And all of that has been secured over the past few years in working closely with the community.”
Billy Haugland, president of Haugland Energy Group, told Newsday: “It’s going to be a dialed-up effort. We have to do big quantities in a short amount of time and leave the area as if we weren’t ever there…. We have a long resume of doing these projects.”
The company also did the cable work for the Block Island Wind Farm, the first offshore wind project in the country off the coast of Rhode Island.
