First U.S. auction of Gulf of Mexico tracts for wind power set for Aug. 29 - ABC News
First U.S. auction of Gulf of Mexico tracts for wind power set for Aug. 29 - ABC News
NEW ORLEANS -- The first auction of offshore leases for wind power development in the Gulf of Mexico will take place Aug. 29 for tracts off the Louisiana and Texas coasts, the Biden administration announced Thursday.
The Department of the Interior said the lease sale will involve more than 300,000 acres (120,000 hectares). That includes a 102,480-acre (41,470-hectare) area off the southwest Louisiana coast, and areas covering 102,480 acres (41,470 hectares) and 96,786 acres (39,160 hectares) off Galveston, Texas.
Plans for the sale come as wind energy projects are already taking shape in the Northeast. Earlier this month, the government gave the go-ahead for New Jersey’s first offshore wind farm to begin construction. That followed approval of projects now under construction in the northeast, one off Massachusetts and the other off New York and Rhode Island.
“We're going to the Gulf,” President Joe Biden said Thursday in Philadelphia. He was there to tour the Philly Shipyard, where there was a steel-cutting ceremony for the Acadia, a vessel that will help to build offshore wind farms.
The administration had said in February that it was considering an offshore lease sale in the Gulf, where industries that traditionally serve offshore oil and gas drilling are also embracing wind energy developments.
The Gulf areas being auctioned next month have the potential to generate 3.7 gigawatts, enough power for nearly 1.3 million homes, the Interior news release said. The administration has set a goal of installing 30 gigawatts of offshore wind energy by 2030.
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.