October 28th, 2016 — The federal government will hold an auction in December to lease nearly 80,000 acres of the Atlantic Ocean seafloor for a developer to build a large wind farm about 18 miles southeast of Sandy Hook.
The triangular area, about 12.5 miles south of Long Beach, on Long Island, is slightly smaller than originally intended, to exclude an environmentally sensitive section of seafloor known as the Cholera Bank, which has an irregular bottom that attracts an abundance of sea life. As a result, it has long been a favorite spot for fishermen to gather year round to bottom fish for blues, cod, blackfish and bonito.
The auction, set for Dec. 15, will come just a year after the Obama administration awarded leases to two companies to build wind farms off the southern coast of New Jersey.
“New York is a critical component in building a robust U.S. offshore wind industry,” said Abigail Ross Hopper, director of the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which oversees commercial offshore wind leases.
The agency conducted a study to determine the visual impact of a hypothetical wind farm in the area to be leased. The simulation shows how a wind farm would look from Fire Island and Jones Beach on the Long Island coast, as well as from Sandy Hook and Asbury Park along the New Jersey coast.