VOLUME 2
OCTOBER
2024
VIVA LA REVOLUTION? WIND ENERGY IN THE GULF OF MEXICO Introduction1 The story of offshore wind energy development in the United States is short in time but rich in detail…. Once upon a time (in 2001) a developer proposed the first offshore wind farm in the United States to be about 5 miles off Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. That Cape Wind project ended 17 years later when the developer withdrew without building a single turbine. While that project ended badly, it was not the end of offshore wind energy. Instead, offshore wind farms are at the beginning of their story. The Gulf of Mexico’s tale of wind energy began in 2021.
Spoiler For those who like to turn to the last page to see how the story ends, here it is: big offshore wind farms are coming to Texas. There is a plot twist – those wind farms are not where the lease sales were held in 2023 and 2024. It is a very Texas tale — wind farm developers are bucking the system. The Bureau of Energy Management (BOEM) carefully outlined the plot, spending years assessing which sites were best for wind farms. In 2023 it offered leases near Galveston, Texas or Lake Charles, Louisiana (with no bids on the Galveston area), and it tried again in 2024 with no bids made. That would make Texas offshore wind a short story. However, two developers want to build northeast of Corpus Christi instead of where BOEM’s lease sales were held (see Map 1). That project came about by a petition to BOEM by Hecate Energy in February 2024. A second energy producer, Invenergy, submitted an Indication of Interest in those sites, anticipating producing energy in 2035.
Map 1
1
The choice of this area should not be a complete surprise. The Department of Energy identified the westernmost Gulf of Mexico as the place in the Gulf with the highest average wind speeds. In fact, windspeeds near Corpus Christi average about 10 percent higher than in the more northern wind energy areas (WEAs). Roughly speaking, each revolution of a turbine produces enough energy to power a home for two days, so the more revolutions, the better.
The author thanks Meghan Kennedy, a Summer Legal Intern at the HRI Marine Policy & Law Program and a Second Year law student at the Vermont Law and Graduate School, for her research for this article.