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8 offshore wind leases in Gulf of Maine up for auction next week

A floating concrete hull developed by UMaine researchers for offshore wind turbines is tested near Castine in 2013. Proximity to this kind of research and technology, called VolturnUS, helps make the Gulf of Maine attractive to wind developers.

Posted on October 28, 2024

Established electricity purchasing systems, strong demand for clean energy, a supply chain being developed and strong winds are seen as advantages for the Gulf of Maine as a site for offshore wind turbines.

Maine will move closer to staking a claim in offshore wind development when the federal government seeks on Tuesday to auction off eight areas for commercial wind energy leases in the Gulf of Maine.

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management will offer lease sites comprising 850,000 acres off Maine, Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

If fully developed, the areas have a total potential capacity of approximately 13 gigawatts that could power more than 4.5 million homes, federal officials say.

“Seeing us get to this point where commercial leases are offered to developers is a big step,” said Jack Shapiro, climate and clean energy director at the Natural Resources Council of Maine. “For Maine and the region as a whole, floating offshore wind is an indispensable part of clean energy resources we need to replace natural gas.”

Natural gas emits carbon dioxide and its price is volatile; it was costly to consumers when global energy markets were roiled by the pandemic in 2020-21 and by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

About two-thirds of U.S. offshore wind energy potential is in waters too deep for wind turbines that require foundations secured to the sea floor, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Floating platforms, such as what are planned for the Gulf of Maine, will instead be used.

THE GULF OF MAINE’S ADVANTAGES

The Gulf of Maine has two advantages over other sites, said Sam Salustro, senior vice president of policy at Oceantic Network, which advocates for the offshore wind industry and its supply chains. Maine has an established system to buy electricity generated from wind power, and Massachusetts will need tremendous offshore wind to meet its carbon reduction targets, he said.

In addition, components needed to build floating wind turbines are already under development, he said. The 2023 Maine Offshore Wind Roadmap said nearly 80 Maine firms are engaged in the offshore wind industry or are in a position to do so for permitting, products, surveying, engineering, maritime operations and other functions.

“There’s a level of certainty not seen everywhere in the world,” Salustro said.

Other assets are “some of the best and most consistent winds” in the Gulf of Maine, said Habib Dagher, executive director of the Advanced Structures and Composites Center at the University of Maine that’s designing and building wind turbines for a research array.

Although it’s unknown how much money the Gulf of Maine auction will yield, Salustro said it “will have to be in the millions.” An auction of nearly 278,000 acres of ocean lease areas off Delaware, Maryland and Virginia in August brought in about $93 million.

Following the Gulf of Maine auction, the successful bidder must submit plans for environmental, technical and public reviews before federal officials authorize a project. Shapiro said it could be the early to mid-2030s before commercial projects operate.

MAINE’S CLAIM TO WIND POWER

The state has already got in line for energy that will be generated offshore. The Legislature and Gov. Janet Mills enacted a law in 2023 calling for wind energy development of at least 3 GW of capacity by 2040 from “federal waters,” the site of the lease areas.

The law established the Maine Offshore Wind Renewable Energy and Economic Development Program that, among its other functions, supports the development of deep-water offshore wind power projects and transmission infrastructure in the Gulf of Maine.

“We don’t control projects because they’re in federal waters, but we can set standards through the procuring of power,” Shapiro said.

Not all attempts at federal auctions have yielded leases. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management in July canceled a lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico “due to a lack of competitive interest” and said it may move forward in the future, depending on industry interest. The agency postponed an Oct. 15 offshore wind energy auction off the coast of Oregon, also due to insufficient interest.

Federal officials announced in March their selection of a 2 million-acre site in the Gulf of Maine for an offshore floating wind project. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management said the site, about 23 miles to 92 miles off the coast, is 80% smaller than its initially planned wind energy area after consulting with tribes, residents, the fishing industry and others.

The Department of the Interior, which oversees the ocean energy bureau, says the Gulf of Maine lease area avoids conflicts with lobster fishing, North Atlantic right whale habitat and other fishing areas and habitats, and seeks to avoid most of the historical and present-day fishing grounds of the tribes.

The New England Fishermen’s Stewardship Association is not swayed. It said in September when federal officials published the lease areas and sales notice that it “remains steadfast in its opposition to the industrialization of our oceans, despite the shrinking of the original proposed lease area.”

Lease areas in the southern Gulf of Maine “comprise a Great Wall of Windmills that threaten mariners and the marine environment,” the group said.

The Biden administration has set a goal of deploying 30 GW of offshore wind energy by 2030 and 15 GW of floating offshore wind energy by 2035, though analysts have warned that the target may not be hit. Offshore wind would have the capacity to generate more than 30 GW by 2033, according to a projection by BloombergNEF. Inflation that’s making elements of the supply chain costlier is blamed for undercutting faster growth.

One nuclear reactor produces about 1 GW, enough for 750,000 homes, according to BloombergNEF.

Two offshore wind projects were built this year: South Fork Wind off the eastern end of New York’s Long Island, and Vineyard Wind 1 off Massachusetts.

RESEARCH DATA AND COMMERCIAL WIND POWER

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management announced in August the first floating offshore wind energy research lease in the U.S. The area covers about 15,000 acres 28 nautical miles off Maine and could allow for up to 12 floating offshore wind turbines capable of generating up to 144 megawatts. It’s separate from the commercial leasing process.

Dagher said ecological, environmental and other data collected by the University of Maine’s research array will provide information for developers selected by the Bureau of Ocean Wind Management.

“We expect a lot of the developers that will be bidding on the Gulf of Maine will be talking to us about what they can learn from this experiment, how they can use that to build farms in the future, particularly in the Gulf of Maine,” he said.

Fourteen energy companies are “legally, technically and financially qualified to bid,” according to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management: Avangrid Renewables LLC, Equinor Wind US LLC, Mainstream Renewable Power Inc., Diamond Offshore Wind, Hexicon USA LLC, Seaglass Offshore Wind II LLC, TotalEnergies SBE US LLC, Pine Tree Offshore Wind LLC, energyRe Offshore Wind Holdings, LLC, OW Gulf of Maine LLC, Repsol Renewables North America Inc., Maine Offshore Wind Development LLC, Corio USA Projectco LLC and Invenergy NE Offshore Wind LLC.

A recent setback for Maine was the rejection by the U.S. Department of Transportation of a $456 million grant to build a wind port at Sears Island where turbines would be built and dispatched to the Gulf of Maine. The state has said it will keep looking for other ways to secure funding.

Chris Wissemann, chief executive officer of Diamond Offshore Wind, one of the bidders for the lease areas, said Maine “will be in a much stronger position” to obtain federal money when it approves power purchases from the research array. The state can then more clearly demonstrate its commitment to floating offshore wind and for a port built in stages, first for the research project, and later for commercial scale wind power, he said.

The Interior Department said in April that it expected four potential offshore lease sales this year, one each in 2025 and 2026, two in 2027 and four in 2028. The sales are anticipated in the Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico, Pacific and offshore of the U.S. territories. That was before the Gulf of Mexico lease sale cancelation and postponement of the auction off of Oregon.

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