New Offshore Wind Project Enters Federal Permitting in US

The US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) will initiate an environmental review of the Vineyard Mid-Atlantic offshore wind lease area, located offshore New York and New Jersey and owned by Vineyard Offshore (Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners), which plans to build its Excelsior Wind project there.

The Vineyard Mid-Atlantic area is in one of the six offshore wind lease areas in the New York Bight, OCS-A 0544. The proposed development involves building a wind farm(s) with up to 117 wind turbines and a total installed capacity of over 2 GW, enough to power more than 700,000 homes, according to BOEM. Vineyard Offshore’s proposal includes up to two potential export cable corridors that would make landfall at Rockaway Beach, Atlantic Beach, or Jones Beach, New York.

BOEM’s announcement on starting the environmental review of the Construction and Operations Plan (COP) submitted for Vineyard Mid-Atlantic comes a few months after the federal agency completed a Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) on the potential environmental impacts of offshore wind activities in the six New York Bight lease areas.

On 14 January, BOEM said that the environmental review of the Vineyard Mid-Atlantic project was the 14th COP review initiated under the Biden-Harris administration.

The lease area, which spans 43,056 acres, is located approximately 38 kilometres (24 miles) offshore Fire Island, New York, and is home to the Excelsior Wind project, a 1.3 GW offshore wind farm Vineyard Offshore entered into New York’s fifth solicitation whose winners will be announced in the first quarter of this year.