HDR Plays Key Role in South Fork Wind’s Plant of the Year Award

Since its commissioning, South Fork Wind has achieved several milestones — most notably becoming the first utility-scale offshore wind farm in U.S. federal waters. The project now supplies 132 megawatts of clean, reliable energy to New York’s power grid.

Adding to its accolades, South Fork Wind has been named POWER Magazine’s 2025 Plant of the Year, the publication’s highest honor.

In the article, “A Transformative Dawn: South Fork Wind Leads America’s Offshore Reboot,” in its July issue, POWER highlighted the many facets that contributed to the project’s success, including navigating a nascent offshore wind market, overcoming permitting challenges, selecting the site, assembling the workforce, and executing complex engineering tasks.

HDR played a key role in the project’s success. In the article, Jaimeer Patel, HDR’s systems protection lead, detailed the team’s contributions to the onshore substation that delivers power to the grid. HDR collaborated with Ørsted and Eversource to lead the detailed design and specification of protection, control and SCADA equipment for the substation.

As part of this effort, HDR developed a unique naming nomenclature that assigned codes to substation components, streamlining communication and improving project efficiency.

“As the first utility-scale offshore wind project in the U.S., many of our experiences can help mitigate challenges for future projects,” Patel said in the article. “A multicast communication approach is essential to avoid blind spots and [help] the right teams ... quickly resolve issues as they arise.”