US interior department is aiming to establish state’s largest competitive auction for coastline wind projects, located on the 742,000 acres off Massachusetts which has the capacity to produce up to 5 giga watts of electricity.
The designated offshore is broken into four divisions that will fulfill the power consumption of around 1.4 million houses around, said department in latest issued e-statement. There are twelve companies all over the globe including Iberdrola SA, Fishermen’s Energy LLC and Deepwater Wind LLC, which have been approved for taking part in auction of 14 miles area off the shore. The bidding episode is programmed on 29 Jan 2015.
This auction will certainly boost up the federal revenues from offshore land available for generating commercial energy on a bigger scale, stated by interior ministry.
The department which has been engaged in ocean energy management has already given 7 auctions. Two offshore sites sold via non-competitive bids such as Atlantic Ocean projects. Whereas, the five were auctioned through proper competitive bids for the area of 357,000 acres off Maryland, New England and Virginia which have contributed $14 million in total governmental revenues.
However, BOEM has some other plans to conduct another auction program for the sublease of coastal area of New Jersey, though the application for installing wind turbines near Atlantic City has been discarded by the state’s Board of Utilities past week.
The size of offshore wind system is too undersized or next to nothing, while the development to expand this utility scale has also lagged all over the globe including renewable energy master China. The reason is that the process of generating energy from offshore wind installations is costly relatively to electricity produce from coal, according to Bloomberg on the basis of authentic data.
