Energy Management Inc. has abandoned the development of the 468MW Cape Wind offshore wind farm and notified the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) that it terminated the development lease, Bloomberg reports.
Cape Wind Associates (CWA) proposed the Cape Wind Energy Project almost 16 years ago, in November 2001, and applied for a commercial lease in September 2005. CWA obtained the commercial lease to construct and operate the wind farm in October 2010.
The lease included a five-year site assessment term and a 28-year operations term.
Back in February 2015, the developer submitted a request for a two-year suspension of the operations term of its commercial lease, which BOEM approved in July 2015. The Cape Wind lease suspension expired on 24 July this year.
On June 22, 2017, CWA submitted a request for an additional two-year lease suspension, which was still being processed by BOEM when the developer decided to terminate the lease.
The Cape Wind project would have featured up to 130 Siemens 3.6MW wind turbines installed at the lease area comprised of approximately 46 square miles in Nantucket Sound, 25 square miles of which make up the project footprint area on Horseshoe Shoal.
According to Bloomberg , the project could not get pass the opposition, involving even the Kennedy family and billionaire industrialist William Koch, and the cancellation of PPA contracts in 2015.