February 27, 2013 — A year after designating large swaths of federal water south of Martha’s Vineyard as ideal for offshore wind development, the government is preparing to hold competitive lease sales for plots inside one of those wind energy areas this summer, outgoing Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar said Tuesday.
Lease sales inside the expanse covering roughly 257 square miles — and others inside another plot off the coast of Virginia — will be the first of their kind, Salazar told a crowd of about 300 at the opening of the Offshore Wind Power USA conference in Boston. The area off Martha’s Vineyard is about 10 times the size of the controversial Cape Wind site off Cape Cod.
“We have already identified where the sweet spots are for wind energy projects in the Atlantic,” Salazar said. “That means that as developers move forward in their significant interest along the Atlantic Coast to propose projects, they’ll know where those projects should go.”
The Department of the Interior has identified half a dozen such areas along the Atlantic Coast, including another giant swath about 14 miles off of Martha’s Vineyard that covers 1,160 square miles of ocean. The other areas are located in federal waters off New Jersey, Maryland, and Delaware.
Though leases are not yet available for the larger wind energy area off Massachusetts, at least 10 developers have expressed interest in building in those waters. That area eventually could produce nearly 10 times the amount of energy expected from the Cape Wind turbines and power an estimated 1.7 million homes, according to government estimates.
Read the full story at the Boston Globe