Biden to announce offshore wind rights sale in Gulf of Mexico
U.S. President Joe Biden will announce the first offshore wind power development rights sale in the Gulf of Mexico on Thursday as part of a trip to highlight the administration’s efforts to boost renewable energy, the White House said. In February the United States proposed to expand offshore wind power development into the Gulf of Mexico, introducing the nascent clean energy industry into a major hub for oil and gas production. The Interior Department will announce that the sale will take place on Aug. 29, the White House said. The sale will include a lease area of 102,480 acres offshore Lake Charles, Louisiana, and two lease areas totaling nearly 200,000 acres offshore Galveston, Texas, the White House said. Companies will bid on the right to develop those acres. The Biden administration has held three offshore wind lease auctions, including the largest ever such U.S. sale last year for areas off the New York and New Jersey coasts that attracted a record $1.5 billion in bids, and the first ever off the Pacific coast in California. Biden is traveling to Philadelphia on Thursday to pitch the promise of a green economy to union workers who remain skeptical that the solar, wind and electric vehicle industries can deliver the same economic punch for organized labor as oil refineries and fossil fuel-fired power plants. Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Related Knowledge Center: Offshore wind energy
Over the next decade, U.S. offshore wind power is expected to grow from a single 30-megawatt wind farm off Rhode Island to more than 2,000 MW of capacity along the Atlantic Seaboard. There are contracts for wind power off the coasts of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Maryland, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Virginia.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory has estimated the United States has over 4,000 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind potential, enough to power the country four times over.
The growth in part being spurred by state solicitations, including in New York, where then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) set a commitment of 9,000 MW of offshore wind by 2035, and in Connecticut, where in June 2021, Gov. Ned Lamont (D) signed legislation authorizing the construction of 2,000 MW of offshore wind by 2030.
The offshore development is also being driven by an investment tax credit set to end in December 2019 and is equal to 12 percent of expenditures. U.S. Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Tom Carper (D-Del.) have introduced a bill to extend the tax credit for up to eight years.
The Interior Department has held eight competitive lease sales that resulted in 15 offshore wind leases over 1.7 million acres that has the potential for 21 GW of capacity. In February 2022, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management completed a bidding process that realized $4.37 billion for 488,000 acres across six lease areas in federal waters off New York and New Jersey.
Projects have also been proposed off the Southeast coast, off California and Hawaii, and for the Great Lakes.