GE has completed the installation of the platforms that will support the first offshore wind farm in the United States.

Built by Deepwater Wind and located three miles off the coast of Block Island, Rhode Island, the wind farm is scheduled to come online at the end of 2016 and generate 125,000 megawatt-hours of electricity—enough to meet 90% of Block Island’s power needs. Currently, residents rely on diesel fuel for their power.

The wind farm will use five massive Haliade wind turbines, which GE is manufacturing at its plant in Saint-Nazaire, France. Each Haliade has a 150-meter-diameter rotor that spins a 6-megawatt direct-drive permanent magnet generator—sufficient to power 5,000 American homes and save 21,000 tons of CO2 during the turbine’s life cycle, according to GE. GE says the design allowed engineers to eliminate the gearbox, reduce the number of moving parts, cut the need for maintenance and lower the operating cost.

A Haliade generator at GE’s factory in St. Nazaire, France. Image credit: GE Renewable Energy.A Haliade generator at GE’s factory in St. Nazaire, France. Image credit: GE Renewable Energy. The generator weighs 150 tons and will sit 100 meters in the air. It is split into three separate electrical circuits. If two circuits go offline, the turbine can still produce 2 megawatts of electricity on the remaining circuit.

GE says low maintenance and redundancy are particularly important for offshore installations, as treacherous waters and high winds can delay repairs for days or weeks.

New wind farms added more than a quarter of total new power generation capacity in the United States between 2010 and 2014, reaching 75,000 megawatts at the end of 2015, according to GE. Only China has greater capacity.

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