Danish offshore wind developer Orsted confirmed on November 5, during a call with investors, that its 704-MW Revolution Wind project off the coast of Rhode Island has entered full commercial operation. The announcement caps a construction campaign that began in 2023 and cost approximately $6 billion. The farm, which feeds the New England grid, started generating earlier in 2026, and the developer says the installation is now producing at its rated capacity.
Revolution Wind uses 65 Siemens Gamesa SG 11.0-200 DD turbines, with the final unit installed in September. Power is sold under long-term purchase agreements with utilities in Rhode Island and Connecticut, among them Eversource and United Illuminating. The project spent much of its life in political limbo: it was among the offshore developments hit by stop-work orders from the Trump administration, which argued such farms could interfere with military radar. Federal judges rejected those claims in several cases. Most recently, attorneys for the Interior Department asked a district court judge for permission to rescind the project's 2023 construction approval — a request that remains pending even as the farm ships full power to the grid. The milestone follows commercial start-up of Orsted's 913-MW Borkum Riffgrund 3 in the German North Sea in late August, part of an 8.1-GW construction portfolio that also includes the 924-MW Sunrise Wind off New York.
For the international engineering community, Revolution Wind is a case study in delivering a mega-project through regulatory turbulence. EPC contractors and installation vessel owners had to hold crews, schedules and subcontractor commitments in place while work was halted and resumed, absorbing costs that no contract clause fully anticipated. The project also shows the scale of the balance-of-plant market that offshore wind now represents: each SG 11.0-200 DD machine carries hydraulic pitch and braking systems, cooling circuits for generators and converters, and dozens of actuated valves controlling lubrication, hydraulics and firewater — equipment that flows through the same industrial supply chains serving oil, gas and conventional power projects. For valve and rotating-equipment suppliers, the aftermarket opportunity is only opening: a fully commissioned 65-turbine farm needs decades of inspection, seal replacement and component overhaul, much of it coordinated from vessels and shore bases around New England. Finally, the political risk premium is real and priceable. Contractors quoting US offshore work will now bake government-intervention scenarios into schedules and contingencies, and clients will pay for it — either in tariffs or in the shrinking pool of capable firms willing to bid at all. With roughly 1.8 GW of capacity delivered by Orsted across Europe and the US in recent months, the supply chain has proven it can execute; the open question is whether policy lets it run at full speed.