Going big on wind powerThree firms pay up for offshore leases
By Marie Szaniszlo
Boston Herald
PUBLISHED: December 22, 2018 at 10:12 pm | UPDATED: December 23, 2018 at 4:53 am
After a groundswell of opposition ultimately doomed Cape Wind’s plan to build a wind farm in Nantucket Sound, something stunning happened this month: Eleven developers vied for three tracts of ocean off Massachusetts’ coast in a two-day bidding war that resulted in the highest-grossing offshore wind sale lease ever.
The winners — New Bedford-based Vineyard Wind, the Norwegian company Equinor and Mayflower Wind, a joint venture owned by Shell and EDP Renewables — each paid $135 million for the right to build some of the country’s first commercial-scale offshore wind farms, which the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management says, together, could produce enough energy to power more than 1.5 million homes. ...
Jack Clarke, director of public policy for Mass Audubon, said the organization helped select the three tracts of ocean that the Interior Department auctioned off this month.
“Environmental review is years away, but we would be very involved in that process as well,†Clarke said. “We would make sure the wind farms are not built in the migratory paths of birds and sea turtles, or during migration season, when construction noise would bother the whales.â€
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