Dominion Wins Interior Dept.'s Federal Offshore Wind Auction
Dominion Virginia Power is the provisional winner of the Interior Department’s second competitive lease sale of federal land off the coast of Virginia to develop an offshore wind farm.
The company bid $1.6 million to win the lease for 112,800 acres. In a statement on Wednesday, the Dominion subsidiary said it will use the land on the Outer Continental Shelf to develop an 2-GW offshore wind turbine farm.
The sale of the wind energy area about 23.5 nautical miles off Virginia Beach on Wednesday follows a July 31 auction of 164,750 acres offshore Rhode Island and Massachusetts for wind energy development that was provisionally won by Deepwater Wind New England, LLC, generating $3.8 million in high bids. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) auctioned the Wind Energy Area offshore Virginia as a single lease, containing 19 whole Outer Continental Shelf blocks and 13 sub-blocks.
Eight companies, including Dominion, were approved to bid, but only two firms participated. The auction lasted six rounds. “BOEM has several milestones that Dominion must meet to keep the lease with the final milestone being the submittal of a Construction and Operations Plan within five years of signing the lease. Once BOEM has the plan, it has an undetermined amount of time to perform an environmental analysis and approve the plan. Dominion expects the first turbine to be installed in about 10 years, pending project approval by state regulators,” Dominion said.
Dominion is involved in other offshore wind research projects. The company’s team was one of seven projects selected to receive $4 million each in federal matching funds to undertake initial engineering, design, and permitting for a demonstration facility of two 6-MW turbines with a goal of finding innovative ways to lower costs of offshore wind. The Department of Energy will select up to three of the projects for follow-on phases to move forward with the final design, permitting, and ultimate construction of these demonstration projects. The projects must be in operation by the end of 2017.
Others companies that BOEM had approved to bid were Apex Virginia Offshore Wind LLC of Charlottesville, Va.; Energy Management Inc. of Boston; EDF Renewable Development Inc. of San Diego; Fishermen’s Energy LLC of Cape May, N.J.; Iberdrola Renewables Inc. of Portland, Ore.; Sea Breeze Energy LLC of Philadelphia; and Orisol Energy U.S. Inc. of Ann Arbor, Mich.
Sources: POWER, Dominion, BOEM