U.S. announces auction for wind-energy leases off LI, NJ coasts

The federal government next month will hold the nation's largest lease auction for six wind-energy areas off the coasts of Long Island and New Jersey, paving the way for projects that could power two million homes.

The nearly half-million-acre lease parcels are located in an area called the New York Bight and have been the subject of review and fine-tuning for nearly a decade.

The areas are farther south and in deeper waters than a separate lease area controlled by Equinor, the Norwegian energy conglomerate that plans to construct two giant wind farms starting 14 miles from Long Island's South Shore beginning in 2024. The turbines are expected to be well beyond the line of visibility from Long Island.

The new lease areas, to be auctioned starting Feb. 23, do not include large swaths of ocean off the Hamptons and areas slightly west that had been included in the original plan by the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.

New York State and local governments had opposed opening those areas, known as Fairways North and Fairways South, in part because they would be so close to prime Hamptons real estate and impinge on near-shore fishing grounds.

Announcement of the lease auction came from Department of the Interior Secretary Deb Haaland. In a conference call Wednesday morning, Haaland said the auction represents a "once-in-a-generation opportunity to fight climate change."

She said the lease agreements will include new incentives to encourage use of American-made components to bolster a burgeoning U.S. offshore-wind supply chain and union workers.

Haaland also noted the lease areas are upward of 72% smaller than originally proposed, primarily to accommodate other ocean uses such as commercial fishing.

Not all fishing interests were on board with the federal plan.

"The frequency of BOEM's announcements on advancing individual offshore wind projects is staggering and far outpaces the time needed to conduct intentional environmental review," said Anne Hawkins, executive director of Responsible Offshore Development Alliance.

"Yet the agency has still only involved fisheries experts through superficial notice and comment, which hasn't led to resolving conflicts especially since fishermen are affected by multiple projects," Hawking said.

Bonnie Brady, executive director of the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association, said that while wind-farm development in the areas will impact squid, scallop and fluke fishing, the fact that regulators reduced the lease areas by 72% percent means the final auction is "better than it could have been."

"Are they spreading the pain around? Yes," she said of federal regulators. "Has the process gotten any better for us? Not at all."

Gov. Kathy Hochul during the conference with Haaland called the federal plan "absolutely transformative," and "exactly what we've been waiting for" after four years of little progress under the administration of former President Donald Trump.

"This is going to give us a chance to position ourselves globally," Hochul said.

Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-Glen Cove), a gubernatorial rival to Hochul, applauded the potential wins for the environment and labor, but added, "We need the federal government to help make these projects economically attractive so ratepayers are winners, too."

A recently approved South Fork Wind Farm off the coast of Rhode Island, for instance, is expected to produce energy at an average cost of around 21 cents a kilowatt-hour, nearly triple that of a natural gas plant. More recent wind-farm projects, costing upward of $3 billion, promise energy at 8 cents a kilowatt-hour or less.

The land-based portion of the South Fork Wind farm, including cable work in East Hampton Town, will begin later this month. Survey work for Equinor's Empire Wind project is also expected to begin in coming weeks.

But New York State has yet to finalize its contracts for two of the largest offshore wind projects it has awarded. The Empire Wind II and Beacon Wind projects awarded to Equinor a year ago amount to about 2,490 megawatts of wind power toward the state's 9,000- megawatt goal by 2035.

Kate Muller, a spokeswoman for the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, which is administering the work, said the contracts could be finalized "in coming weeks," but declined to explain the delay. Terms of those contracts, including the price for energy, will be publicly available when the pacts are complete, she said.

With similarly ambitious goals for wind energy, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, like Hochul, said the Biden administration's efforts in offshore wind were a "night and day" improvement in comparison with the Trump administration, which he said, "slowed down whatever progress we'd been making … They wanted to drill for oil and gas off shore."

Environmental groups applauded the change. Allison Considine, senior campaign representative for the Sierra Club, called the lease sale a "major milestone" for New York's goal as well as Biden's for 30,000 megawatts nationwide by 2030.

The lease auction "demonstrates that New York’s goal of achieving 100% fossil-fuel-free electricity is not only feasible, it is breaking ground on new opportunities that will revitalize our economy and create a national leadership hub for responsible offshore wind development," Considine said in a statement.