On January 12, Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland announced that the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) would hold an offshore wind energy auction for more than 488,000 acres in the New York Bight. It’s still under way, and bids have now collectively reached around $2 billion.

This is the first offshore wind lease sale in over three years, and is the first offshore wind energy auction under the Biden-Harris Administration.

BOEM is providing round-by-round updates on the online auction throughout the day. Once the auction ends, the Department of the Interior will announce the provisional winners for each of the six lease areas.

The New York Bight extends northeasterly from Cape May Inlet in New Jersey to Montauk Point on the eastern tip of Long Island.

Just before noon ET today, BOEM was on round 30 of the auction, where combined live bids for the six leases stood at $2 billion. Reuters points out:

That easily topped the US offshore wind auction record of $405 million set in 2018. It was also far more than recent oil and gas auctions in US federal waters. A sale of drilling rights in the Gulf of Mexico late last year, for instance, attracted $191.7 million in high bids.

There are 25 eligible bidders. Offshorewind.biz points out:

Shell, BP, and Equinor, alone or through joint ventures, are pre-qualified to bid, as are RWE, SSE Renewables, Ocean Winds, and Iberdrola’s Avangrid Renewables, among others. According to a spokesperson from Ørsted, the offshore wind giant is also an eligible bidder, but through a company under a different name – which the developer is keeping a secret until after the auction is completed.

The offshore wind power cited in the areas under auction areas has the potential to power nearly two million homes in the future, once it’s fully up and running. The collective installation capacity, according to BOEM, is 5.6 gigawatts and total power production is 19,625,081MWh/year.

Read more: New York Bight gets green light for massive 480,000 acre offshore wind deal

Photo: BOEM

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