The US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) has completed an environmental review for potential wind development activities within the New York Bight area.
The six wind lease areas in the environmental review cover over 1.975 sq km offshore New York and New Jersey. With the review completed, BOEM estimated that lease areas could generate up to 7GW of offshore wind energy when fully developed, enough to power up to 2m homes.
"We appreciate the feedback we have received, and we believe our regional approach will provide a solid baseline for future environmental reviews for any proposed offshore wind projects in the New York Bight," said BOEM Director Elizabeth Klein.
In February 2022, BOEM held an auction that brought in over $4.3bn for the rights to six lease areas in the New York Bight - a record amount for any US offshore renewable or conventional energy lease sale.
BOEM prepared a programmatic environmental impact statement which analyzes potential environmental impacts of offshore wind activities in the six New York Bight lease areas. It identifies avoidance, minimization, mitigation, and monitoring measures that BOEM may require as conditions for approval for activities proposed by lessees in the individual construction and operations plans submitted for these six lease areas.
The Bureau sought information on important resources and issues, potential impacts on the environment as well as mitigation measures. Before completing the environmental review, BOEM took into consideration 1,568 unique comments from 560 submissions.
In parallel, the US Department of Energy announced $17m in funding for 14 projects supporting US offshore wind energy and marine energy deployments.
These projects include research for technology advancements to improve the integrity of mooring systems that keep floating offshore wind energy platforms and marine energy converters in position when operating in deep waters. The projects also include research to reduce or avoid noise generation during the installation of fixed-bottom offshore wind energy foundations.