The Interior Department has announced that the administration will hold the nation’s first offshore wind lease sale in late July. The area scheduled for lease consists of 164,750 acres off the coasts of Rhode Island and Massachusetts. In response to this announcement, Institute for Energy Research (IER) published a fact sheet on offshore wind energy development in the United States.
Offshore Wind Is Very, Very Expensive
Cape Wind Shows Just How Expensive Offshore Wind Is
Offshore Natural Gas Produces More Energy than Offshore Wind Projects
More Examples of Potential Offshore Wind Projects in the United States
Interior Department Will Announce Its First Offshore Wind Lease Sale
Leasing Offshore Wind in the Atlantic While Banning Oil and Natural Gas Production Is “Picking Winners and Losers”
According to Interior’s response letter, “The Cash Bonus and/or Acquisition Fee paid by NRG for the lease was $0.25 per acre amounting to $24,107.50 for the 96,430 acres. The average bid per acre for the last oil and gas lease sale held on November 28, 2012, in the western Gulf of Mexico, was $205.” In other words, the federal government gets 820 times more money in bonus bids from offshore oil and gas leasing per acre than they do from leasing offshore wind.
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Press release, June 5, 2013; Image: Siemens