Dive Brief:

• The U.S. Department of Interior this week announced that a commercial wind lease sale has been scheduled for March 16 that covers more than 122,000 acres off the coast of North Carolina.
• The sale will be managed by the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), which also said it has selected nine companies to bid that the agency identified as legally, technically and financially qualified.
• The agencies have been working on the Kitty Hawk lease sale for more than two years as offshore wind development have been slow to take off. 

Dive Insight:

There are thousands of potential gigawatts of clean wind energy offshore the United States, but so far development has been sluggish. It was only last month that the country's first commercial offshore wind farm began operating in the waters of Rhode Island.

But the industry is beginning to pick up steam (so to speak).

BOEM has granted 11 commercial offshore leases for development, designating a dozen areas in the Atlantic as suitable for wind development. Companies have also proposed floating wind farms off the California and Hawaiian coasts. Massachusetts has passed a mandate for 1,600 MW of offshore capacity by 2027, a bold move that some expect to transform the industry.

The North Carolina wind sale has been in the works for years. BOEM published a revised environmental assessment in 2015, allowing the sale to go forward in three North Carolina Wind Energy Areas, Kitty Hawk WEA, Wilmington East WEA, and Wilmington West WEA. But the Wilmington East and Wilmington West WEAs, due to their proximity and shared attributes, "have been coupled with the planning and leasing process for the South Carolina Call Areas," DOI said.

Outgoing Secretary of the DOI Sally Jewell said the announcement highlights years of collaborative work with federal, state and local entities. 

“Today’s announcement demonstrates how our collaborative efforts with federal, state and local partners over the past eight years have built a foundation to harness the enormous potential of offshore wind energy,” Jewell said in the agency's announcement. “The lease sale underscores the growing market demand for renewable energy and strong industry interest in meeting that demand.”

Companies which will be eligible to bid include:

• Avangrid Renewables LLC

• Enbridge Holdings (Green Energy) LLC

• Shell WindEnergy Inc.

• Northland Power America Inc.

• Wind Future LLC

• Outer Banks Ocean Energy, LLC

• PNE Wind USA, Inc.

• Statoil Wind US LLC

• wpd offshore Alpha LLC

The sale was published this week in the Federal Register as Lease OCS-A 0508. 

The first and only operating offshore wind facility in the United States, Block Island, is a five-turbine, 30 MW facility off the coast of Rhode Island that began producing energy in December. The $300 million project can power 17,000 homes with turbines built by General Electric and will supply 1% of Rhode Island's electricity.