BOEM announced the Final Sale Notice (FSN) for offshore wind leasing on the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) in the U.S. Gulf of Maine. The FSN set the auction for October 29, 2024. The FSN includes eight lease areas off Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine. If fully developed, these areas have a potential capacity of approximately 13 gigawatts of clean offshore wind energy, which could power more than 4.5 million homes.
The area included in the FSN is approximately 120,000 acres less than what BOEM proposed in its Proposed Sale Notice (PSN), which was announced earlier this year. These removals, informed by public comment and engagement meetings, prioritized the avoidance of offshore fishing grounds and sensitive habitats, as well as the facilitation of existing and future vessel transit, while still retaining sufficient acreage to support the region’s offshore wind energy goals.
The FSN was published in the Federal Register on September 17, 2024, and contains information about the areas available for leasing, certain lease provisions and conditions, auction details, criteria for evaluating competing bids and procedures for lease award, appeals and lease execution.
The FSN reflects a multi-year planning process that has included robust engagement with Tribes, local communities, federal and state agencies, ocean users, and stakeholders to balance the complex social, ecological, and economic factors in the Gulf of Maine. See BOEM’s Gulf of Maine page for more background and history. BOEM partnered with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science (NCCOS) to incorporate the best available ocean resource information to understand multiple ocean uses and inform wind energy areas. The NCCOS model outputs for the Gulf of Maine analysis can also be viewed in the Data Explorer under Energy and Infrastructure > Planning Areas > Gulf of Maine NCCOS Suitability Modeling Final WEA 2024. The layers and the methodology to produce them are also described by NCCOS in a recent StoryMap.
