South Korea’s leading cable maker LS Cable & System Ltd. said on Thursday that it has successfully completed the installation of its underground cables for the first offshore wind farm in the United States. The company hopes that the latest project can allow it to expand presence in the rapidly growing U.S. wind energy market.

According to the company, it has recently installed submarine cables for the Block Island Wind Farm - the first commercial offshore wind farm in the U.S. built by National Grid, a local energy company covering the country’s eastern region, and American offshore energy development group Deepwater Wind.

LS Cable & System has completed the installation of the cables more than two years after LS Cable & System signed a $74 million supply and installment contract with the two U.S. companies in February 2015, to provide the undersea cable system. The cable will transmit power among offshore generators or between an offshore wind farm and an onshore substation.

It had taken a year for LS Cable & System to produce and transport the 45-kilometer-long and 3,200-ton-heavy submarine cable from its exclusive manufacturing facility in Donghae, a city in Gangwon Province in Korea and another year to complete installation.

Myeong No-hyeong, chief executive of LS Cable & System, said that demand for offshore wind farm is growing in the U.S., and given the fact the country entirely relies on imports of submarine cables amid an absence of local undersea cable manufacturers, the Korean company expects to take part in other projects in the U.S. in the future following the successful installation of the cables for the electrical grid of the U.S. first offshore wind farm.

Currently, a 90-megawatt wind farm is under construction in the waters off Montauk in Long Island, New York, as part of the South Fork Wind Project. The state of New York has already received approval from the U.S. federal government to build offshore wind generators that can produce 700 megawatt energy in total. The Massachusetts state legislature also passed a renewable energy bill that pushes for the construction of a 1.6 gigawatt offshore wind farm by 2025.

An unnamed official from LS Cable & System said that compared to onshore wind power, offshore wind power consumes more power but it has less adverse effect on the environment and produces less noise pollution, which is why the demand for wind power has been expanding in Europe and North America. LS Cable & System is also confident to expand its presence in the U.S. thanks to its extensive experience supplying undersea cables to offshore wind farms in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Belgium, the official added.

By Moon Ji-woong

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