Federal Government to Hold West Coast Offshore Wind Lease Sale

By Christian Roselund

The U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) will hold an offshore wind energy lease sale on 6 December 2022 for areas on the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) off central and northern California. This will be the first wind lease sale on the West Coast, following 10 similar sales on the East Coast from New England to North Carolina which resulted in the award of 27 leases.

In the Pacific Ocean, BOEM will offer five lease areas that total 1,511 square kilometers, two of which are located off the coast of Northern California near the Oregon border, and three of which are off the Central Coast roughly halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. The agency estimates that these have the potential to host 4.5 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity.

This will be the first sale where developers plan to deploy floating offshore wind platforms, which are more suited to the deeper waters off the Pacific Coast than the fixed foundations that dominate East Coast offshore wind. The sale follows on a new goal by the Biden Administration to deploy 15 gigawatts of floating offshore wind
by 2035.

But while the Biden Administration had awarded leases to host 35.5 gigawatts of offshore wind as of August 2022, the nation has only begun to build its first large projects and at present only 42 megawatts of offshore wind is online. According to a 25 October 2022 article Avangrid and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners are preparing to start laying the underwater cable to the 800-megawatt Vineyard Wind project off the coast of Massachusetts, the first large offshore wind project to reach this phase in the United States.

Source: Biden-Harris Administration Announces First-Ever Offshore Wind Lease Sale in the Pacific (U.S. Department of the Interior)