By Lathrop Craig, Senior Vice President, Chief Commercial Officer, PSEG

For more than a century, PSEG has helped power the New Jersey economy as the Garden State emerged as an urban manufacturing center and, more recently, transitioned to a suburban service economy. We choose New Jersey and work to support the state in everything we do, consistent with the core values of our founder, Thomas McCarter, who created the Public Service Company 119 years ago with the vision of making New Jersey a better place to live and work.

Today, we are working with the state to expand our clean energy economy in response to the reality of climate change, in keeping with our vision to power a future when people use less energy, and it’s cleaner, safer and delivered more reliably than ever.

Gov. Phil Murphy is leading the charge. His vision is for New Jersey to be a clean energy leader, including having offshore wind projects generate 40 percent of the state’s electricity by 2035. To accomplish the Governor’s goal, we need to build a comprehensive offshore wind solution.

Taking full advantage of offshore wind resources will require an offshore transmission grid that efficiently and reliably connects offshore wind farms with New Jersey’s existing on-shore power grid. Rather than having each wind farm run its own “extension cord” to shore, a consolidated approach can be more reliable at a lower cost and with less environmental impact.

Developing a holistic offshore wind solution is no small undertaking; in fact, the offshore transmission approach being developed by New Jersey is the first of its kind in the United States. The New Jersey Board of Public Utilities is currently evaluating project proposals through a competitive process to choose the best projects for New Jersey.

As Thomas McCarter would expect, PSEG is ready to step up to this challenge. In response, we are collaborating with Ørsted to build the Coastal Wind Link, an innovative set of proposals to develop an offshore grid uniquely designed to most reliably meet New Jersey’s needs for decades to come.

Ørsted is the global leader in offshore wind energy, complementing PSEG’s deep New Jersey experience. Ørsted has established real New Jersey roots, developing the Ocean Wind 1 and 2 offshore wind farms and investing deeply in the state’s clean energy economy and workforce. Together, Ørsted and PSEG are an unrivaled team, with the deepest combined experience building transmission on land and at sea. Ørsted has developed more than 28 offshore wind farms and 17 offshore transmission systems across the world’s oceans. PSEG owns and maintains over 2,044 miles of underground and above-ground transmission lines, and our New Jersey-based utility has been recognized as the most reliable utility in the Mid-Atlantic for the past 20 years.

Building transmission infrastructure in New Jersey takes more than technical know-how; it requires strong relationships built over decades with New Jersey communities, workers, unions, and contractors. Our commitments are backed by our demonstrated ability to build transmission projects on-time and on-budget, and we have proposed a strong cost cap on this project to back that up.

New Jersey is the first state to use a statewide approach to offshore wind transmission development. The unequaled experience of the PSEG-Ørsted team can assure that New Jersey’s major investment in offshore wind is a safe bet.

We have developed an innovative transmission design that is unlike any of the other proposed projects to deliver the highest level of resiliency and reliability. Our design includes a meshed grid approach, a successful initiative being developed in Europe and brought to New Jersey by Ørsted and PSEG. The meshed grid would connect New Jersey’s offshore wind farms to several on-land interconnection points, creating the ability to instantly reroute power and keep it flowing even if a line goes down.

Coastal Wind Link will allow each offshore wind farm to “plug and play” into the project in a highly efficient way that will reduce costs to utility customers. In addition, the project will accommodate technological advances long into the future, avoiding costly upgrades as offshore wind grows in New Jersey. Coastal Wind Link’s unique design elements will help position New Jersey as a world leader in offshore wind while delivering greater resiliency, cost savings, flexibility, and reliability over time.

In keeping with Thomas McCarter’s vision, Coastal Wind Link will make New Jersey a better place to live and work. It will help power the economy of the future, bring jobs to the state, and unlock the benefits of Offshore Wind for New Jersey residents.

This is sponsored content from PSEG