Iberdrola wins bid to build offshore wind farm in North Carolina

U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s (BOEM) declared Avangrid Renewables, a subsidiary of Iberdrola, as the preliminary winner of the auction for 122,405 acres off the coast of Kitty Hawk, N.C., for development as an offshore wind energy facility.

Avangrid secured the lease sale with a winning bid of US$9.067 million. 

Four parties participated in the auction in both the first and second rounds. The second-round asking price was US$342,734. Back in January, nine companies had been qualified to compete for the lease area. The list included Avangrid Renewables LLC, Enbridge Holdings (Green Energy) LLC, Shell WindEnergy Inc, Northland Power America Inc, Wind Future LLC, Outer Banks Ocean Energy LLC, PNE Wind USA Inc, Statoil Wind US LLC, and Wpd offshore Alpha LLC.

The Kitty Hawk lease area begins about 24 nautical miles from shore and extends 25.7 nautical miles in a general southeast direction. Its seaward extent ranges from 13.5 nautical miles in the north to 0.6 of a nautical mile in the south. Using the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s estimates of 3 MW per square kilometer, the lease area has a potential generating capacity of 1,486 MW. The actual size of the wind energy project will be determined by the developer.

James P. Torgerson, CEO of AVANGRID, Inc., stated:

We are very excited about this opportunity for Avangrid Renewables to play a leading role in the growing U.S. offshore wind industry, a reliable source of clean energy that has significant job-creation potential in North Carolina and the United States.

Avangrid Renewables has a proven track record of clean energy development, with approximately 6.5 gigawatts of wind, solar and other renewable generation facilities in service or under development in 20 U.S. states.

Between our leading position in the United States, including North Carolina, where we operate a wind farm near Elizabeth City, along with the expertise and experience of our international affiliate, Iberdrola Group, in developing offshore wind in Europe, we felt we were well positioned to secure this bid.

We are confident in our ability to leverage those channels, along with our supply chain knowledge and our development and transmission expertise, in order to deliver a competitively priced product to our eventual customers.

We salute the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and the Department of the Interior for the professional manner in which they went about the bidding process, reflected by the initial large number of parties that pre-qualified to bid. We are excited to undertake the enormous task before us in bringing this project to fruition, and confident in its completion.