For more than a year, thousands of unionized ironworkers, carpenters, and operating engineers have been constructing a colossal wind farm in an 80,000-acre expanse of ocean south of Long Island. A football-field-size barge, ushered along by tugboats, has been installing the cable that will connect Empire Wind 1 to the grid along the seafloor, a power line so massive that Hugh McElroen, an electrician working on the project, compares it to a “tree trunk.” The turbines themselves will be nearly 900 feet tall; though barely visible from the shoreline — they’ll poke from the horizon like matchsticks — it will take the world’s second-largest crane to help assemble them. The project could eventually supply the city with enough energy to power nearly half the homes in Brooklyn.
Despite its hulking size and ambition, the building of Empire Wind 1 has been something of a covert operation. The Trump administration is openly hostile to wind projects, and EW1 has so far survived only because of delicate negotiations.
