By Gary Stephenson, senior vice president of power supply, Long Island Power Authority, New York
Since the Long Island Power Authority’s inception in 1998 as a public power utility, we have been committed to protecting our local environment. The largest island in the contiguous U.S., our service territory is home to over 3 million people. From Queens to the Hamptons, Long Island, New York, is a remarkably diverse place. But as an island, it is especially vulnerable to the effects of climate change, and we know we need to take action.
Our vision for power supply is to provide clean, reliable, and resilient energy to our customers at an affordable cost. That is how we best serve our customers and how we best support economic growth, investment, and jobs in our communities. When we bring renewable energy, electric vehicles, energy efficiency, and clean heat to Long Island, we bring savings and growth. We seek to bolster the economic competitiveness of our region while minimizing economywide greenhouse gas emissions by encouraging the electrification of vehicles, buildings, and equipment.
New York’s Climate Act is among the most ambitious in the nation. It calls for an orderly and just transition to a clean energy economy with investments that create good-paying jobs and foster healthy communities. This is both an ambitious agenda and a realistic one.
LIPA, along with the state and other New York utilities, is taking action to achieve the goals set forth in the Climate Act, including a 100% zero-carbon electric grid by 2040 and an 85% reduction in economywide carbon emissions by 2050. That zero-carbon electric grid will unlock opportunities to further reduce emissions in other sectors of the economy, including transportation, buildings, industry, and agriculture.
LIPA’s leadership on zero-carbon power spans decades and includes some of the first and among the largest renewable energy projects and initiatives in New York state. One example of this dates back to 2015, when LIPA sought new resources to meet load growth on the South Fork of Long Island. We ran a comprehensive solicitation and selected a portfolio of clean resources, consisting of load control programs, battery storage, and an offshore wind farm. In 2017, LIPA signed a power purchase agreement for South Fork Wind — the first offshore wind farm in federal waters and in New York state. LIPA will buy the energy, capacity, ancillary services, and renewable energy credits from the project, which was developed by Ørsted and Eversource.
South Fork Wind began construction in February 2022, starting with the onshore export cable system that links the project to our electric grid. The wind farm reached its “steel in the water” milestone in June 2023 with the installation of the project’s first monopile foundation, and its final turbine was installed in February 2024.
In total, the wind farm consists of 12 wind turbine generators, each with blades 318 feet in length and spanning over 656 feet in rotor diameter — about the length of two football fields. Located 35 miles from the easternmost point of Long Island, the project delivers 130 megawatts of power to the local substation in the town of East Hampton through undersea and underground transmission cables.
Over the life of the project, over 6 million tons of carbon emissions will be offset, the equivalent of taking 60,000 cars off the road. Offshore wind is poised to become the largest source of energy for Long Island and the Rockaways by 2030, when nearly half of the power supply to Long Island is projected to be sourced from offshore wind.
While we’ve made some major accomplishments, there’s still more to do. The path forward is set forth in our Integrated Resource Plan that was recently approved by our board. The plan lays out an evolving deployment of renewable technologies and other decarbonization solutions and illustrates how LIPA can meet and exceed the goals of our state’s Climate Act while maintaining the two most critical aspects of service to customers: reliability and affordability.
The energy landscape is most certainly going to shift over the course of the next five years, and we are well positioned to navigate those changes with smart planning and investments — continuing to lead the way into our clean energy future on behalf of our customers.
