Vineyard Wind I offshore wind farm

We are developing offshore wind energy in many different countries around the world, including the UK, Germany and France.. Vineyard Wind I is our first offshore wind facility to be delivered in the United States. The project is located off the coast of Massachusetts –15 miles south of Martha's Vineyard and 34 miles south of the Cape Cod peninsula– and will have an installed capacity of 806 MW generating enough clean electricity meet the demand from over 400,000 homes and businesses across the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. 

Vineyard WindExternal link, opens in new window. , a company in which the Iberdrola Group has a 50 % stake – through Avangrid Renewables, a subsidiary of Avangrid* – and the Danish investment group Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners (CIP), have been in charge of the development and construction of the wind farm. Once commercial operation begins, Iberdrola will assume responsibility for controlling the operation and management of the facility, following an agreement reached with Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners.

Vineyard Wind I has been supported by a $3 billion investment (over 2.7 billion euros at current exchange rates) guaranteed through contracts with the three main energy providers in the state.

The wind farm will create 3,600 Full Time Equivalent (FTE) job years, save customers $1.4 billion over the first 20 years of operation, and is expected to reduce carbon emissions by more than 1.6 million metric tons per year, the equivalent of taking 325,000 cars off the road annually. Vineyard Wind will also provide New England ratepayers with $3.7 billion in energy savings.

In July 2021, Vineyard Wind signed the first Project Labor Agreement for an offshore wind project in the United States, which outlined the creation of 500 union jobs though the project. In December 2023, project shareholders announced that Vineyard Wind 1 has delivered nearly double of its commitment through the PLA by creating 937 union jobs through two years of construction.

The project received the Ruth H. Silman Award for Climate Change Project of the Year Award from the Environmental Business Council (EBC) of New England, the first organisation in the United States created to support and encourage the development of the environmental industry.
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* AVANGRID, Inc. is 81,50 % owned by Iberdrola, S. A.

This new project helps to reaffirm Iberdrola’s position as a global leader in offshore wind power.

Evolution of the project

On 18 November 2021, construction began on Vineyard Wind I, the first large-scale offshore wind farm in the United States, roughly 25 times larger than the only other offshore project that existed in the country at that time, located in Rhode Island.

The project achieved steel-in-the-water in June 2023, and completed the nation’s first offshore substation in July 2023. 

In May 2021 the project received the Record of Decision (ROD) from the U.S. Department of the Interior Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), the final major step in the federal review process. Prior to that, going back to 2017, the Vineyard Wind 1 project completed an exhaustive public review process that generated more than 30,000 public comments, more than 90% of which supported the project.  The Construction and Operations Plan (COP) was reviewed by more than two dozen federal, state, and local agencies over the course of more than three and a half years. 

In 2020 the company executed an agreement with ISO New England to connect its generation into the New England electric power grid – at the NSTAR 115kV switch station in Barnstable, Massachusetts–, and signed long-term energy sale agreements with Massachusetts’s electricity distribution companies.

In October 2023, Vineyard Wind 1 project closed a first-of-its-kind tax equity package for commercial scale offshore wind with three US-based banks. The $1.2 billion dollar investment transaction was reached with J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo, making it the largest single asset tax equity financing and the first for a commercial scale offshore wind project.  

The components

Vineyard Wind uses GE Renewable Energy's industry leading Haliade-X wind turbine generators, the most powerful in operation to date, with up to 13 megawatts of power and a height of 248 metres. Each of these turbines can save 52,000 tonnes of CO₂ per year and in a single rotation generates energy for a home in Massachusetts for an entire day.

Meanwhile, Windar Renovables has been responsible for manufacturing 62 wind turbine foundations. The contract, worth around 100 million euros, has led to approximately 400 jobs (500 at peak times) at the plant in Asturias (Spain).

The Italian Prysmian Group, after entering into an agreement worth 200 million euros, was responsible for the commissioning of the submarine cabling system that will connect the offshore wind farm with the Continental US power transmission grid. The project required a total of 134 kilometres of high voltage alternating current electric cable.

The U.S. company Southwire was in charge of the design, manufacture and installation of the more than 51 kilometres of high-voltage overland cable. The cable has been manufactured at the Southwire plant in Huntersville (North Carolina), which will use avant-garde technology to produce high and extra-high-voltage cables ranging from 69 kV to 500 kV.

In July 2023, the installation of the offshore substation, which will serve the entire Vineyard Wind I project, was completed. It is the first substation of its kind installed by Iberdrola in the United States and the sixth in the world, weighing more than 5,000 tonnes, making it the largest the company has ever installed. 

Iberdrola, world leader in renewable energies

At Iberdrola, we dare committed to renewable energy more than two decades ago as a fundamental pillar on which to build our safe, clean and competitive business model. Thanks to this vision, we are today world leaders in renewables, reaching 44,148 MW of clean energy in operation at the end of september 2024.

This commitment is reflected in our Strategic Plan, in which we will allocate €15.5bn gross to renewables. More than half of this amount is focused on offshore wind in the US, UK, France and Germany; 28% on onshore wind and 18% on solar.