Long Island’s 2024 Offshore Wind Revolution: How Professional Coastal Property Surveys Navigate Marine Boundary Changes and Utility Easements

Long Island stands at the forefront of America’s offshore wind revolution in 2024, with multiple major projects transforming the region’s energy landscape and creating unprecedented challenges for coastal property owners. New York’s offshore wind leader, Ørsted, announced that it has submitted a finalized proposal for its Long Island Wind project, which would power up to 1 million New York homes with renewable energy, while two larger projects are under construction: Empire Wind 1 and Sunrise Wind, which will generate a combined 1,734 megawatts—enough to power one million homes when completed in 2027.

The Offshore Wind Boom Creates New Surveying Challenges

Danish wind energy developer Ørsted and the utility Eversource built a 12-turbine wind farm called South Fork Wind 35 miles (56 kilometers) east of Montauk Point, New York, with South Fork Wind being a 12-turbine, 132 MW offshore wind farm powering ~70,000 Long Island homes. This milestone represents just the beginning of massive infrastructure development that will fundamentally alter Long Island’s coastal landscape.

Equinor is building Empire Wind 1, 15-30 miles south of Long Island, located 15-30 miles southeast of Long Island, delivering 810 MW of energy into Brooklyn, powering 500,000 New York homes. These projects require extensive submarine cable networks that traverse coastal waters and make landfall on Long Island properties, creating complex utility easement requirements.

Marine Boundary Changes and Environmental Impacts

The installation of offshore wind infrastructure creates significant changes to marine boundaries and coastal environments. Recent numerical modeling research determined that a hypothetical upper bound full buildout of OSW farms in central California could warm coastal waters through a reduction in upwelling, examining the sensitivity of coastal marine heatwaves (MHWs), which are prolonged extreme seawater temperatures that are among the greatest threats to marine ecosystems, to seawater temperature increases motivated by OSW-induced warming.

After the approval of the SAP, lessees have up to 5 years to develop a suitable Construction and Operations Plan (COP) and perform additional site characterization and site assessment activities before construction activities start, with meteorological buoys deployed to measure and analyze winds, waves, ocean currents, sediment, and water quality properties, while metocean studies also involve numerical modeling of waves and currents and hydrographic and geophysical surveys.

Utility Easements: The Critical Connection Points

The most significant impact on coastal property owners comes from the utility easements required for offshore wind transmission infrastructure. Empire Wind’s transmissions lines are proposed to come ashore on Long Beach and traverse underground until interconnecting to Long Island’s power grid at the E. F. Barret power station in Oceanside, with Empire Wind 1 delivering power via submarine cables, making landfall in Brooklyn, New York, where export cables come ashore at the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal, where a new onshore substation will step up the voltage to 345 kV.

For property owners, these utility easements create permanent restrictions on land use. An easement is a legal right for someone else to use part of your property for a specific purpose—usually utilities, access, or drainage, where you still own the land, but you can’t build on it or block access, and no structure, fence, or tree may be placed in an easement without the written consent of all utility companies that have the right to access an easement.

Why Professional Property Surveys Are Essential

As offshore wind development accelerates, accurate property surveys become critical for coastal property owners. A professional Surveyor Long Island can identify existing utility easements and help property owners understand how new offshore wind infrastructure might affect their land rights.

With over five decades of service in Nassau & Suffolk County, NY, Island-Wide Land Surveyors brings exceptional expertise in land surveying, with their commitment to professionalism, reliability, and rapid response setting them apart. The company understands the unique challenges facing Long Island property owners as offshore wind development transforms the region.

Professional surveyors prepare a survey map showing property lines, dimensions, corner markers, any encroachments or easements, and the location of buildings, fences, and other improvements, measuring with precision equipment, marking corners with permanent monuments, and creating a detailed map showing your property lines, any easements, and where structures sit in relation to those boundaries.

Addressing Complex Coastal Survey Requirements

Offshore wind projects require sophisticated environmental assessments that extend to coastal properties. The identification of potential sites for offshore wind development includes an evaluation of the local environmental, economic, cultural, and community impacts, as well as other ocean uses, with comprehensive assessment of visual impacts across different lines of sight providing the public and stakeholders with insight on the potential visual changes to their coastlines, while visual, historical, and cultural impact surveying and evaluation is completed for other land-based facilities, such as the development of onshore substations.

Property owners need current, accurate surveys to understand how these changes might affect their land values and usage rights. Professional surveys reveal easements that give utility companies or neighbors legal rights to use portions of your land and document encroachments, which happen when a structure from one property crosses onto another, identifying easements that might limit how you can use certain areas.

The Future of Coastal Property Rights

As Long Island’s offshore wind industry expands, property owners face an evolving landscape of regulations and easement requirements. With commercial operation starting in 2033, Long Island Wind would deliver up to 1,485 megawatts of clean and reliable offshore wind energy at stable and affordable pricing for New York homeowners and businesses for decades, with the project bringing several billion dollars of in-state investment.

Island Wide Land Surveying serves as the top choice in Suffolk, Nassau, and Queens Counties for land surveying needs, with unwavering dedication to excellence in land surveying, coupled with exclusive focus on this field, earning an esteemed reputation in the industry, customizing each project to specific requirements and guaranteeing timely delivery of survey results.

Professional land surveys provide the documentation and legal clarity property owners need to navigate this changing landscape. Whether you’re buying coastal property, planning improvements, or simply want to understand your rights as offshore wind development proceeds, accurate boundary surveys and easement identification remain essential tools for protecting your investment in Long Island’s evolving coastal environment.