NJ's Offshore Wind Farms Grow To 9; Firms Bid $4B To Operate

NEW JERSEY — President Joe Biden and Gov. Phil Murphy are moving full steam ahead in their shared quest to build thousands of acres of wind farms off the New Jersey coast.

The U.S. Department of the Interior held an auction Feb. 23 for private companies to build wind farms on six plots of the Atlantic Ocean off the Jersey Shore. (The plots can be seen mapped above.)

Six companies bid a combined $4.37 billion to build the wind farms, and those six companies were awarded contracts, the federal government announced Friday.

Those six leases approved Friday are in addition to three separate wind farms already approved off the coast of Long Beach Island and Atlantic City. This makes a total of nine plots of ocean off the Jersey Shore that Biden and Murphy seek to turn into wind farms.

In total, the Department of the Interior plans to lease more than 488,000 acres off the Jersey Shore for wind energy development.

The wind farms located off LBI/Atlantic City will be the ones closest to land. The nearest will be located 10 miles off Barnegat Light; that farm will be run by a subsidiary of Shell Oil.

Two additional wind farms will be located about 15 miles off Atlantic City. Those farms will be operated by Danish company Ørsted.

Ørsted previously told Patch that its wind turbines will be visible from LBI or Atlantic City beaches on a clear day.

Ørsted will also be using the biggest and most powerful wind turbines in the world to date. The diameter of each turbine will be 548 feet and will be 640 feet tall. To put that in perspective, the Statue of Liberty is 305 feet tall.

Their first wind turbines are expected to start running in late 2024, said Maddy Urbish, an Ørsted spokeswoman.

The six leases approved Friday will be farther out at sea — 27 nautical miles off the Jersey coast, according to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.

The Biden-Harris administration wants to significantly advance wind, solar and other green energy in the U.S. and have America use much less natural gas, oil and coal.

And Gov. Murphy is making the coast of New Jersey wide open for the president to do so.

Murphy tweeted this week that the Feb. 23 auction marked a “huge week for our offshore wind industry.”

“By leading the nation in offshore wind, we’re growing our economy and bringing good-paying jobs to the Garden State,” he said.

Murphy has a goal of making 50 percent of New Jersey's electricity come from clean-energy sources by 2030, and 100 percent by 2050. Murphy also said he wants New Jersey to provide 7,500 megawatts of offshore wind power by 2035. And the Biden administration has a goal of providing 30 gigawatts of offshore wind nationwide (not just in New Jersey) by the year 2030.

The Biden administration called Friday's lease sales "a major milestone" in reaching those goals.

The $4.37 billion in bidding Feb. 23 was the the highest-grossing competitive offshore energy lease sale in history, including oil and gas lease sales — showing there is much interest from Wall Street and private equity firms in wind energy.

“This week’s offshore wind sale makes one thing clear: The enthusiasm for the clean energy economy is undeniable and it’s here to stay,” said Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland. “The investments we are seeing today will play an important role in delivering on the Biden-Harris administration’s commitment to tackle the climate crisis and create thousands of good-paying, union jobs across the nation.”

Here are the six companies awarded the offshore wind contracts on Friday, and how much they bid to operate the farms:

• Bight Wind Holdings LLC: Bid $1.1 billion to operate a 125,964-acre wind farm.
• Attentive Energy LLC: Bid $795 million to operate an 84,332-acre wind farm.
• Atlantic Shores Offshore Wind Bight LLC: Bid $780 million to operate a 79,351-acre wind farm.
• OW Ocean Winds East LLC: Bid $765 million to operate a 71,522-acre wind farm.
• Invenergy Wind Offshore LLC: Bid $645 million to operate an 83,976-acre wind farm.

• Mid-Atlantic Offshore Wind LLC: Bid $285 million to operate a 43,056-acre wind farm.

These six contracts are still only provisional; they still have to be approved by the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission.

Prior Patch reporting on wind farms coming off New Jersey: Feds Want To Bring Wind Farms To 480,000 More Acres Off NJ (Jan. 13, 2022)

Massive Offshore Wind Farms Coming To The Jersey Shore (Sept. 23, 2021)

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