Every long cable is a capacitor whether anybody wanted one or not.
Conductor down the middle, a layer of insulation around it, and conductive seawater pressed against the outside.
That is the exact recipe, and it does nothing at all as long as the voltage stays put.
Alternating voltage does not stay put. It swings the full way sixty times a second.
So the cable charges and discharges, sixty times a second, along its entire length.
And the longer the run of cable is, the worse that particular problem gets.
The current that fills the cable instead of leaving it
That charging current is not a small side effect once you are out at sea.
A buried submarine cable sits packed against wet ground, so its capacitance per mile is far higher than a line strung in open air.
Every mile added draws more current just to charge the insulation, and that current takes up room in the conductor that real power cannot use.
Push the length far enough and the cable spends its entire rating charging itself up, with nothing at all left over for the far end.
On land you break that up with compensation gear every so many miles along the route. Underwater there is nowhere to put any of it.
Direct current sidesteps the problem completely, since a voltage that never swings never charges anything after the first instant.
The price is a converter station at each end, which is a building rather than a component.
What sits at the two ends of it
Offshore there is a platform that gathers the output of the whole array and converts it into direct current.
Onshore, at Holbrook in Suffolk County, there is a second station that turns it back and hands it to the local grid.
Between them runs a single export route of about 105 miles, buried under the seabed and then under land.
The farm itself is 84 turbines rated at 11 megawatts each, adding up to 924 megawatts.
The nearest land is Montauk, roughly 30 miles to the west, with Block Island closer to the north and Martha’s Vineyard about 19 miles away.
Nothing about that layout is unusual except the current it uses.
Where the project has actually got to
Construction started offshore in the summer of 2024 and the export cable was pulled in during the winter that followed.
The first turbine went up in April of 2026, nearly two years after the work at sea began.
Installation is continuing through the array now, and the developer has said it expects to deliver first power to the state later this year.
Full commercial operation is targeted for the second half of 2027, roughly a year after that.
The contracted price is 146 dollars a megawatt hour over 25 years, and the developer took a write down of roughly 1.7 billion dollars on the project after the foundation costs ran over.
The owner bought out its partner’s half in 2024 and now holds all of it.
The claim that keeps getting made too early
No electricity from this farm has reached the shore yet, and none has been sold.
That sentence gets written the other way round constantly, and it is the single most repeated error about the project.
A cable installed is not a cable energized, a turbine standing is not a turbine generating, and first power is a specific announced event that has not happened.
The turbine rating gets muddled as well. Some references list an eight megawatt machine, but 924 divided by 84 comes out at eleven, and eleven is what the developer states.
The first claim is the safer one. This is the first American offshore wind project to use direct current transmission, which is true today and stops being remarkable the moment the next one does it, the way records around a larger farm or a bigger blade keep moving under people, as the installation report sets out.
Why the cable decided the whole project
Distance to shore is not really a question about distance. It is a question about what the connection to the grid ends up costing.
An alternating current link would have needed compensation platforms out at sea, or a shorter route to a weaker connection point closer in.
Neither of those was available here, so the two converter stations went into the plan and the route was allowed to run as long as it needed to.
That decision then set the landfall, the onshore route, the substation and the schedule, as the project’s own account lays out.
The turbines are the part that everybody photographs and counts.
The export cable is the part that settled the argument.
