March 17, 2017
North Carolina

Operator of Pasquotank wind farm wins offshore lease bidding

Coastal Review Online | March 16, 2017 | outerbanksvoice.com

After 17 rounds of bidding, Avangrid Renewables Inc. has submitted the winning amount of $9,066,650 to lease more than 122,000 acres of Atlantic Ocean waters off the coast of Kitty Hawk.

Avangrid, operator of the Amazon Wind Farm in Pasquotank and Perquimans counties, submitted the winning bid in the auction held Thursday.

Avangrid CEO James P. Torgerson said the company was excited about the opportunity to play a leading role in the growing U.S. offshore wind industry and its job-creation potential.

Avangrid Renewables has about 6.5 gigawatts of wind, solar and other renewable generation facilities in service or under development in 20 states.

“Between our leading position in the United States, including North Carolina, where we operate a wind farm near Elizabeth City, along with the expertise and experience of our international affiliate, Iberdrola Group, in developing offshore wind in Europe, we felt we were well positioned to secure this bid,” Torgerson said.

“We are confident in our ability to leverage those channels, along with our supply chain knowledge and our development and transmission expertise, in order to deliver a competitively priced product to our eventual customers.”

According to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, a federal agency under the Department of the Interior in charge of the lease, the area begins about 24 nautical miles from land and extends 25.7 nautical miles to the southeast.

Its extent goes 13.5 nautical miles north and .6 nautical miles to the south.

Throughout the day, four bidding companies were narrowed down to one.

While offshore wind farms are common overseas, the U.S. is still in the early stages of developing them. The nation’s first offshore wind farm recently went into operation off the coast of Rhode Island.

To date, BOEM has held six competitive lease sales, which have generated over $58 million in bids for more than one million acres in federal waters, the statement said.

URL to article:  https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2017/03/17/operator-of-pasquotank-wind-farm-wins-offshore-lease-bidding/