On December 7, 2022, the U.S. Department of the Interior’s (DOI) Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) announced the results of an offshore wind energy lease sale, or auction, it held the previous day for five lease areas on California’s Outer Continental Shelf (OCS). This auction is the third major offshore wind energy lease sale this year—and the first-ever for the Pacific region—and resulted in high bids from five companies totaling $757.1 million.
The lease areas included in BOEM’s auction cover a combined total of 373,268 acres and have the potential to produce over 4.6 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind energy. According to BOEM, if and when developed, this amount of energy is enough to power roughly 1.5 million homes.
