March 30, 2024 — Following more than a year of tumult in the industry that called into question the future of offshore wind in New England, Massachusetts and its southern neighbors on Wednesday got the menu of options for the next phase of clean energy development.
Massachusetts is seeking as much as 3,600 megawatts of offshore wind capacity in its fourth procurement round, its biggest procurement ever. And through a tri-state partnership with Rhode Island and Connecticut, Massachusetts and its neighbors are planning to coordinate their selections for a combined 6,000 megawatts of offshore wind energy capacity, leading to the possibility of multi-state projects although the newly submitted bids in the aggregate fall short of reaching that 6,000 megawatt threshold.
The latest round of bids comes after Massachusetts and other states in the Northeast went backwards on offshore wind over the last year and a half. Both projects selected in Massachusetts’ last procurement became much more expensive as inflation took off and the war in Ukraine snarled supply chains, and the developers behind them paid multi-million dollar fines to back out of the contracts they had agreed to. Both projects were re-bid in some form Wednesday, are are expected to come with a higher price to ratepayers.
By Wednesday’s noon deadline, Massachusetts received proposals from three developers who also submitted their proposals for the multi-state solicitation: Vineyard Offshore, Avangrid Renewables and SouthCoast Wind. At their maximum, the projects that were bid to Massachusetts on Wednesday would represent a cumulative 4,270 megawatts of capacity. The developer Orsted also bid a 1,184 megawatt project to Rhode Island and Connecticut, making approximately 5,454 megawatts available for the multi-state effort.