Wind Farm ‘Landing’ Site Would Be Hidden From View Beneath Ocean Beaches

As Deepwater Wind moves forward with formulating its final plans for a 90-megawatt wind farm in the ocean southeast of Montauk, it has highlighted what the landing site for the subsurface power cables that would connect the 12 to 15 turbines to land would look like.

Earlier this month, officials from the Rhode Island company acknowledged that they have turned their focus to three potential landing sites along East Hampton’s oceanfront, after the initial plan to bring the cable through Gardiners Bay and onto land at a Napeague or Amagansett bay beach drew an outcry from baymen and skepticism from town officials.

The company is looking at three potential landing sites: the beach access cut at Hither Hills in Montauk, Napeague Lane in Amagansett and Beach Lane in Wainscott.

While all three sites would require the cable to run beneath popular public beaches, the company has said the process would cause no disruption to the beach at all during installation and only limited disruption to parking or access to the beaches in the winter months.

“One of the principles we’ve committed to is to maintain beach access to the beach throughout and at least one lane of traffic flow on the roads,” Clint Plummer, Deepwater Wind’s vice president, said this week after touring the site on Block Island where power cables from the five turbines the company has already constructed 3 miles off the island’s coastal bluffs come ashore. “We believe there is room for what we need to do at all those sites.”

On Block Island, the landing sites are marked by just four manhole covers in the dirt parking lot of the island’s main public beach. Beneath the manholes sit two concrete vaults, each about 10 by 20 feet, where mechanics can service the buried power cable connections when needed.

With a horizontal drilling machine, the company says, it will be able to bore a hole and install protective conduit for the cable 10 feet underground and as far as 2,000 feet out into the Atlantic without ever digging into the surface of the beach or dunes.

Ships burying in the sea floor the cable that connects to the wind farm will meet up with the conduit where it comes out of the ground beyond the surf zone. The cable will then be pulled ashore through the conduit to the on-land connection point.

How far into the ocean the conduit will have to extend before meeting the cable will depend on surveys the company is currently conducting of the conditions on the sea floor at each site.

“In a coastal environment, there’s more considerations for the stability of the site,” Mr. Plummer said. “We need to find a place where there’s no environmental concerns and no erosion to unearth the cable. It will be at least several hundred feet offshore.”

Mr. Plummer said that the Beach Lane site is attractive because of its proximity to the PSEG substation at Buell Lane in East Hampton Village, which is the only substation the wind farm’s power cable can be hooked into. But the conditions on the oceanfront would be the more telling factor, he said.

All the drilling would be done between November and March, Mr. Plummer said.

East Hampton Town Supervisor Larry Cantwell said that the town is waiting to see what the company’s proposal for a landing site winds up being before starting to weigh in on the need to use town beach parking lots for the connection vaults. If the company should chose Hither Hills, he noted, the approvals would have to come from only the state.