The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) released the environmental review of the six offshore lease sites in the New York and New Jersey on Monday. The project is expected to supply over 19.9 MWh/ yr and will power close to 2 million homes.
This announcement comes over two years since the auction for the rights of the lease areas was done in February of 2022. The auction reportedly brought in over $4.3 billion which was the most any US offshore renewable or conventional energy lease sale has ever generated.
New York Bight
The six lease areas collectively referred to as New York Bight, spanning varying area sizes will be under the the following companies:
• Community Offshore Wind
• Invenergy Wind Offshore
• Attentive Energy
• Vineyard Mid-Atlantic
• Atlantic Shores Offshore Wind Bight, and
• Bluepoint Wind
The total lease area is set at 488,000 acres, with only 27 acres designated “ not-developable”.
After plan submissions by the respective companies was done in June this year, the environmental review done by BOEM was completed on Monday. The review will be published in the Federal Register on the 25th of October.
The review stated that there could be impact to marine life though predictions indicated they would only be temporary. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration also noted that marine line would not be “jeopardized” despite there being indications of adverse effects to the ocean life in the areas where development has been proposed.
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Who has the largest share of New York Bight?
Among the project managers getting the largest share of the New York Bight is Community Offshore Wind. It got the lease of over 125,000 acres and is expected to generate up to 1300 MW of power in installation capacity. This will serve over 485, 000 homes.
They are expected to continue submitting progress reports to BOEM every six months until the Construction and Operations Plans (COP) are approved. This applies to all the other lessees in the project. The aim of the progress reports is to ensure that everyone involved in the project is fully on board.
This is not to be understated as The Atlantic Shores Projects in New Jersey that got their COP earlier this month might be facing lawsuits from environmental justice groups and non profit organizations like Save LBI.
The project is a pivotal in the “30 GW of offshore wind energy by 2030” plan by the US government.
Offshore wind energy in Maryland
Further down from New Jersey, along the east coast, the state of Maryland also saw the announcement of the tenth commercial-scale offshore wind energy project in the US in September. The project manager notes that over 5 GW of clean renewable wind energy will be generated. This will be able to power over 718,00 homes. Other upsides of the project will be over 2600 jobs created annually over a seven year period. The project will be done in three phases and will include 144 wind turbine generators, four offshore substations, one met tower, and four offshore export cable corridor. Two of the three phases – MarWin and Momentum Wind, already have their “go-ahead” greenlight from the state.
