Gulf of Maine offshore wind lease auction scheduled

U.S. ocean energy managers will soon auction the right to lease about 850,000 acres offshore Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts, according to a recent federal announcement. 

On September 16, 2024, the Department of the Interior announced an offshore wind energy lease sale to be held on October 29, 2024. Through an auction process, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management will sell leasehold interests in eight designated areas in the Gulf of Maine.

According to BOEM's Final Sale Notice for offshore wind leasing on the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) in the U.S. Gulf of Maine, the government will auction rights to eight separate lease areas within the Gulf of Maine. Each lease area varies in total acreage as well as "developable acres", with the average size being just over 100,000 acres per area. 

If fully developed, BOEM says these "these areas have a potential capacity of approximately 13 gigawatts of clean offshore wind energy, which could power more than 4.5 million homes."

BOEM notes that these lease areas exclude about 120,000 acres that BOEM had initially proposed for leasing; these areas were removed following public comment, engagement meetings, and concern over impacts to fishing grounds, navigation, and habitats. The Final Sale Notice also follows BOEM's recent issuance of its final Environmental Assessment of leasing in the Gulf of Maine Wind Energy Area (WEA).

Separate from this commercial leasing process, earlier this year BOEM entered into the nation’s first floating offshore wind energy research lease, covering about 15,000 acres elsewhere in the Gulf of Maine.

BOEM releases Gulf of Maine offshore wind environmental assessment

U.S. federal ocean energy managers have issued a final assessment of the environmental impacts of issuing leases for offshore wind development in the Gulf of Maine. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management's final Environmental Assessment (EA) of the Gulf of Maine Wind Energy Area (WEA) sets the stage for future leasing.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Energy designated the Gulf of Maine WEA and announced that BOEM would prepare an EA on potential impacts from offshore wind energy leasing in the Gulf of Maine. BOEM also proposed an offshore wind energy lease sale in the Gulf of Maine featuring eight potential leasing areas offshore Maine, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire.

Furthering these processes, on September 6, 2024, BOEM announced the availability of its final EA for offshore wind site leasing in the Gulf of Maine. The final EA evaluated the potential issuance of commercial wind energy leases off the coasts of Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts. 

BOEM's September 2024 environmental review considered potential environmental impacts from pre-development activities like conducting surveys and installing meteorological buoys. BOEM found that leasing and these site assessment and characterization activities will not have a significant impact on the environment.  

Notably, this EA did not cover the installation of offshore turbines in the Gulf of Maine. Any specific project development of that nature would need to be assessed in a separate environmental review, following lease issuance and a project proposal by a leaseholder.

Separately, in August 2024, the Department of Interior issued a research lease for a floating offshore wind project in the Gulf of Maine. BOEM has called that agreement "the nation's first floating offshore wind energy research lease." 

ISO-NE EPCET report projects future power supply and demand

New England's electric grid must overcome operational, engineering, and economic challenges to support state decarbonization commitments, according to a recently released draft report by grid operator ISO New England. ISO-NE's Economic Planning for the Clean Energy Transition (EPCET) study report concludes that a "vast renewable build-out may be required" to support wide swings in demand for electricity across days and seasons.

Today, peak demand for electricity occurs during the summer for reasons including air conditioning demand. But ISO-NE projects that peak demand for electricity will shift from summer to winter by the mid-2030s, as heat pumps are increasingly used to decarbonize building heating. 

As this new form of heating load becomes dominant, the weather will increasingly affect the level of peak demand, with a severe winter calling for up to 20 gigawatts more power than a mild winter. Increased variability in power system demand will require "vastly different supply levels from year to year", according to ISO-NE. The grid operator expects that this variability will mean that some dispatchable capacity is needed for reliability but might operate infrequently: "Some resources needed to maintain reliability during the harshest conditions may only run for a few days once every few years."

Another consequence of this variability is that emissions reductions will vary seasonally. Relatively high power production by wind and solar resources in spring and fall could combine with relatively lower levels of electricity demand in those seasons to yield substantial decarbonization in spring and fall, many years before summer or winter achieve that level of decarbonization. "Modeling shows spring will be mostly decarbonized by 2040, but a small portion of winter days will still produce significant emissions in 2050."

To meet these projected levels of demand solely with renewable resources, ISO-NE projects that the scale of development needed is vast. "If the future resource build-out is almost entirely wind, solar, and batteries, the region will need to add roughly 18 times its current combined capacity of these resources to achieve state emissions goals and maintain reliability." Revenue structures for generators might also need to change, to accommodate expected surplus generation from wind and solar resources in spring and fall. 

ISO-NE thinks that long-duration storage can help during shorter cold snaps but not over more extended periods of severe winter weather. To ensure reliability during prolonged severe winter conditions, ISO-NE suggests firm, dispatchable, zero-carbon generation, such as the use of synthetic natural gas (SNG) and small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) as possible resources. The EPCET report concludes that SNG and SMRs may reduce overall system costs, by reducing the need for new renewable capacity.