Three companies bids to supply New York with offshore wind power

(Adds bidders, details)

OSLO, Feb 14 (Reuters) - Norway's Equinor ASA and a joint venture of Danish Orsted and Eversource Energy have submitted bids to supply offshore wind power to the New York State, the companies said on Thursday.

New York state closed bidding https://on.ny.gov/2E54m5q on Thursday to provide 800-megawatts of offshore wind and will choose a supplier in the spring.

If Equinor wins the bid, it will likely provide the power by developing a wind farm on 80,000 acres south of Long Island it won in a U.S. federal auction in 2016, with a potential capacity of up to 2 gigawatt (GW) offshore wind power.

When functioning at full capacity, Empire Wind could generate enough clean energy to power about 1 million American homes, Equinor said on its website.

Orsted and Eversource Energy (NYSE: ES - news) 's Sunrise Wind project located east of Montauk Point could supply up to half a million homes, and will be virtually unnoticeable to Long Island residents and beach goers, the companies said in a statement.

Equinor said it expected that under certain conditions its turbines will be visible from shore.

The companies did not provide details of their bids.

Equinor says on its website that investments for a 1-GW offshore wind project would typically be about $3 billion.

Oil and gas firm Equinor, formerly known as Statoil (LSE: 0M2Z.L - news) , rebranded itself last year as a broad energy company, aiming to invest up to 20 percent of annual capital expenditure in "new energy solutions" by 2030, mostly in offshore wind.

In total, Equinor and four joint ventures, with partners also including French EDF and Royal Dutch Shell Plc (LSE: 0LN9.L - news) , told the state they may be interested in bidding by Dec (Shanghai: 600875.SS - news) . 20 deadline.

EDF (Paris: FR0010242511 - news) and Shell (LSE: RDSB.L - news) were not immediately available to comment. (Reporting by Nerijus Adomaitis; editing by Susan Thomas and Lisa Shumaker)