First Commercial Offshore Wind Lease Coming Soon

June 10th, 2013 by Nicholas Brown

Offshore wind farm via Shutterstock

In federal waters in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, there is a 164,750 acre area with a potential power generation capacity of 3.5 GW. It is to be auctioned in two parts in July.

The areas will be leased as the North Lease Area, and the South Lease Area by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM).

According to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (part of the DOE), the North Lease Area has an electricity generation capacity of 1,955 MW, and the South Lease Area 1,440 MW, enough to power more than a million homes (about 1.1 million).

This leasing program is the first of its kind of the United States.

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Tags: Land leasing, Leasing land for wind farms, united states, Wind farm leasing

About the Author

Nicholas Brown writes on CleanTechnica, Gas2, Kleef&Co, and Green Building Elements. He has a keen interest in physics-intensive topics such as electricity generation, refrigeration and air conditioning technology, energy storage, and geography. His website is: Kompulsa.com.

Lindy4

This will be the first lease sale, not the first lease. The first commercial lease was given to Cape Wind in 2010.
sethw

Nicholas (and other cleantechnica staff),

I strongly suggest not using shutterstock for all your photos… it’s sucks cuz there are so many open source / flickr photos out there u can use after properly citing and then others can read ur articles and go ahead and use the photos also…

Plus you guys always choose great photos and i cant download for a desktop wallpaper =(
- http://www.kompulsa.com/ Kompulsa (Nicholas)
  
  Thank you for the suggestion.
  
  I try to keep the images small to limit bandwidth usage. I have this same problem sometimes and will try to work something out.
  - https://twitter.com/MatthewLRose Matthew Rose
    
    …or images from the linked pdf. As I wanted to familiarize myself with area of the turbine placement, there are 3 suitable map image which you could have used.