Two European developers — PNE Wind AG
and Statoil — have proposed two separate offshore wind farms off the
northeast coast of the United States, and are asking the US government
to open up new offshore sites.
The US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management
(BOEM) revealed last week that it received two unsolicited lease
requests from German developer PNE Wind AG and Norwegian oil and gas
company Statoil to develop offshore wind farms on the Outer Continent
Shelf (OCS). Specifically, the unsolicited requests are seeking
permission to look at developing on offshore sites which have not
hitherto been opened up for interest, and therefore currently have not
been properly vetted for impact on the environment and animal life.
According
to the BOEM, PNE Wind has submitted three separate unsolicited requests
for Lease — one off the coast of Long Island in New York, and two off
the coast of Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts — and Statoil has
submitted for the same area.
PNE’s first request is for a lease of
40,920 acres off the coast of Long Island for a project it is calling
NY4-Excelsior Wind Park, a project which would have a preliminary
capacity of between 300 and 400 megawatts (MW). In its request, PNE note
that, “This is an unsolicited application for a potential lease area
that has not been identified previously, although it is located not too
far from the New York Wind Energy Area (WEA) for which a lease auction
was held on December 15-16, 2016 and for which an Environmental
Assessment (EA) exists.”
PNE bills itself in the request as “an
international project developer of onshore and offshore wind farms” and
has, since 1990, developed more than 200 onshore wind farms, and has an
offshore wind pipeline in Germany of just over 2,800 MW.
The next step for this particular
project will be for the BOEM to decide whether to move forward at all,
and then to issue a public notice to determine whether there is any
competitive interest in bidding for the specific area.
The
second area, located off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard in
Massachusetts, has received unsolicited interest from both PNE Wind and
Statoil. The proposed lease area is actually two separate areas —
labelled OCS-A 0502 and 0503 — and measures approximately 248,015 acres
and 140,554 acres respectively.
Because both PNE and Statoil have both
requested the same lease areas, BOEM has determined that “competitive
interest exists” and will therefore proceed with a competitive leasing
process. PNE has proposed two 400 MW wind farms, whereas Statoil has
gone with the more abstract idea of highlighting the overall potential
of the area — which it determines is anywhere from 3 to 15 gigawatts
(GW).
News of the unsolicited requests has
raised some eyebrows, with environmentalists and community leaders
questioning the viability of the moves. Specifically, according to a
news piece written by News 12 Long Island, “Local
environmentalists and community leaders are questioning a German
company’s plan to build a wind farm off Fire Island.” The article
quotes Adrienne Esposito, of the Citizens Campaign for the Environment,
who raises the question of whether the Long Island area would receive
the appropriate environmental studies.
However, given the current climate of
wind energy development, there has been no real evidence that companies
are willing to skirt the law on these feasibility studies, and many
developers have actually gone out of their way to accommodate wildlife
and sea life.source: https://cleantechnica.com
No comments:
Post a Comment