October 19, 2018 — Nearly 400,000 acres of the Massachusetts Wind Energy Area will be up for grabs in December, as the Trump administration holds its next offshore wind auction, officials announced this week.
U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke revealed Wednesday that the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management will auction off 388,569 acres located on the Outer Continental Shelf offshore Massachusetts on Dec. 13.
A total of 19 companies — including Deepwater Wind New England, LLC, Mayflower Wind Energy LLC, and Northeast Wind Energy, LLC, among others — have qualified to take part in the auction, according to the agency’s final sale notice.
The bureau will auction off three leases that are located in an area where two former leases were unsold during the Atlantic Wind Lease Sale in January 2015. The new lease areas will respectively cover about 129,000 acres, 127,000 acres and 132,000 acres.
Zinke touted the December auction, offering that “the Massachusetts sale has a lot of potential for both energy and economic activity.”
“If fully developed, the wind auction could support approximately 4.1 gigawatts of power to supply nearly 1.5 million homes,” he said in a statement. “This is just one example of the importance of fostering wind energy as a new American industry.”