The Department of the Interior announced on Sept. 16 that it will hold an offshore wind energy lease sale at the end of October. Developers will vie for the right to produce clean energy from eight different areas in federal waters dozens of miles off the coasts of Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts.

If fully developed, these areas have the potential to produce about 13 gigawatts of energy – enough to power more than 4.5 million homes. That’s a lot of electricity, enough to avoid nearly 50 million tons of fossil fuel emissions as well as help reduce our dependence on foreign sources of energy.

This is a very good thing for Maine.

Climate change represents the single largest threat to Gulf of Maine fish and wildlife. As an organization dedicated to wildlife conservation, Maine Audubon has spent a lot of time evaluating and advocating for opportunities to address climate change, including supporting renewable energy. Offshore wind in the Gulf of Maine presents an opportunity we can’t afford to ignore.

But we have to do it right. This lease sale is also the culmination of years of work from Maine Audubon, our environmental partners across New England, fishing groups and other advocates to convince the federal government to only issue leases in specific areas, those with the least amount of potential impacts on wildlife, commerce and transit.

Released in August 2022, the initial potential lease area covered more than 13.7 million acres of water, including nearly the entire Gulf of Maine. The feds asked stakeholders for help identifying areas of conflict to remove from potential leasing.

Potential fisheries impacts were given top consideration, especially lobstering. Maine Audubon and many other environmental groups joined fishing groups, Maine’s congressional delegation and Gov. Mills in calling for the entirety of Lobster Management Area 1 – millions of nearshore acres between Cape Cod and the Canadian border – to be removed from consideration for leasing. The coastline of the Gulf of Maine is an extremely biologically productive area, and while proximity to land made those acres prime for wind developers, the potential disruption to the coastal ecosystem and our vital lobster industry could not be tolerated. As a result of our collective advocacy, the entirety of Lobster Management Area 1 was removed from consideration.

At the same time, we assessed other potential environmental impacts of this initiative. Maine Audubon and dozens of other groups, and state and federal agencies, worked to map out areas of high value to whales, bats, migratory songbirds, seabirds, fish and other Gulf wildlife to be avoided. Collectively we asked for additional potential lease areas to be removed from consideration, and suggested lease stipulations and other protections, such as reducing the potential for vessel strikes, secondary entanglement and other impacts to marine mammals. Together, stakeholders were able to convince the federal government to remove more than 10 million acres from the initial proposed area earlier this year.

The final area, announced on Sept. 16, includes additional safeguards. An additional 120,000 acres was removed from the plan to further protect the area around the important Jeffrey’s Bank Habitat Management Area and around the wildlife area Cashes Ledge, which has been nominated to become a National Marine Sanctuary – a proposal Maine Audubon supports. Additionally, new lease stipulations were added to require acoustic monitoring of marine mammals and to avoid bottom-disturbing activities.

We didn’t get everything we wanted. The federal government is allowing bidders to enhance their bids with certain non-monetary commitments called “bid credits.” Developers could commit to paying for workforce development programs and/or paying into a Fisheries Compensatory Mitigation Fund. We had also hoped they would include a conservation bid credit to help fund research and monitoring. We’ll keep at it.

Still, the final lease areas represent a major win in our collective work to advance thoughtful offshore wind development in Maine. We have an opportunity to get clean, locally produced energy in a way that avoids or minimizes potential impacts to wildlife and fisheries.

This process is working, and we’re looking forward to a cleaner future.