Empire Wind 1 Offshore Wind Farm

Empire Wind 1 will put 810 megawatts into the New York City grid through a Con Edison connection in Gowanus, which makes it the first offshore wind project to feed the city directly rather than routing power around it. Fifty-four Vestas V236 turbines at 15 MW each sit in Lease Area OCS-A 0512, roughly 15 to 30 miles southeast of Long Island.

Project Scope

Two 230 kV export cables run about 15 miles in parallel to landfall at the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal, where Skanska USA managed a redevelopment of roughly 60 to 73 acres into the project’s staging and operations base. The heavy-lift areas there are rated to 6,000 pounds per square foot.

Foundations went in through 2025 using a semi-submersible crane vessel. Turbine installation runs off the Maersk Viridis, a wind turbine installation vessel purpose-built for 15 MW-class machines, working through a US-flagged feeder-barge arrangement to stay Jones Act compliant. Kirby Offshore Wind supplies the tugs and barges and Edison Chouest built the service operations vessel ECO Liberty.

Labour is covered by two separate agreements, one with the Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York for onshore work and one with NABTU offshore. More than 4,500 workers have been on the project, over 3,000 of them union trades.

Why It Matters

The construction risk here has been regulatory, not technical. A federal stop-work order in April 2025 was lifted the following month. A second and broader suspension order covering five East Coast projects landed on 22 December 2025; Equinor sued, and on 15 January 2026 a federal judge in the District of Columbia granted a preliminary injunction letting construction resume with the project already past 60 percent complete. The litigation had not concluded at the time of writing, and anyone reading this should check the current position before relying on it.

That is the useful lesson for contractors weighing offshore work. The vessels, the monopiles and the cable installation are now reasonably well understood. The schedule risk that actually stopped this job twice came from a permitting decision made years after financial close.

Project Team & Details