A federal auction of offshore wind areas off Cape Cod today resulted in only half of the eight leases sold and two winning bidders. Leases on the areas closest to the Outer Cape were among those sold.
Vineyard Wind half-owner Avangrid and Chicago-based Invenergy bought two leases each, at prices ranging from $4.9 million to $6.2 million.
The companies can now pursue permits for enough turbines to power a total of more than 2.3 million homes.
Had all eight leases been awarded, the output could have roughly doubled that, providing about 13 gigawatts of energy.
Invenergy was the winner of the offshore wind lease closest to the Outer Cape and one closer to Maine.
Avangrid won two others, just east of the one closest to the Cape.
All of the potential wind farms off the Outer Cape are expected to use floating turbines, because the water is too deep for turbines fixed to the ocean floor.
Speaking Thursday at a wind conference in New Bedford, Avangrid’s chief development officer, Ken Kimmell, said floating turbines are the future of offshore wind.
“Most of the offshore wind facilities in the world, and in the nation, have been built in kind of a sweet-spot area — areas off the coast that are shallow,” he said. “But the key thing to understand is we're actually running out of those places, both internationally and here in the United States.”
As deeper waters go, waters in the Gulf of Maine are attractive for floating turbines, he said.
“They're like 200 meters deep, as opposed to, for example, in California, 1,000 meters deep,” he said. “So these are very likely to be the first places in the United States where floating technology actually gets deployed.”
