Will Nearshore Wind Farms Impact NY & NJ Fisheries?

The Department of the Interior announced the nation’s sixth competitive lease sale for wind farms in federal waters. Yesterday's lease sale offered 79,350 acres offshore New York for potential wind energy development.
The provisional winner of today’s lease sale is Statoil Wind US LLC, which bid $42,469,725 for lease area OCS-A 0512.

Statoil will now have the opportunity to explore the potential development of an offshore wind farm to provide New York City and Long Island with an additional source of electricity.

“We are excited to have submitted the most competitive bid in a highly attractive project, Statoil’s first offshore wind lease in the United States. We now look forward to working with New York’s state agencies and contribute to New York meeting its future energy needs by applying our offshore experience and engineering expertise,” says Irene Rummelhoff, Statoil´s executive vice president for New Energy Solutions.

The New York Wind Energy Area spans 79,350 acres, and covers water depths between 65 and 131
feet. It starts approximately 11.5 nautical miles from Jones Beach, NY. From its western edge, the area extends approximately 24 nm southeast at its longest portion. The lease area consists of five full Outer Continental Shelf blocks and 143 sub-blocks. A map of the lease area can be found here.

 Statoil will conduct studies to understand the seabed conditions, the grid connection options and wind resources involved in the lease site.

“We will work closely with the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) on these studies and throughout the permitting process, and in connection with power offtake options,” says Rummelhoff.

Statoil is a Norwegian company primarily focused on upstream oil and gas operations. From a daily production of approximately 1.8 million barrels of oil equivalent (BOE), more than 270,000 BOE stem from the company’s onshore and offshore oil and gas fields in the U.S.