Offshore wind lease sale in North Carolina could power half a million homes

North Carolina's coastlines are bursting at the seams with clean, renewable offshore wind potential just waiting to be used.

Wind power

Gideon Weissman and Bryn Huxley-ReicherFrontier Group; Matthew Casale and John Stout

North Carolina’s coastlines are bursting at the seams with clean, renewable offshore wind potential just waiting to be used.

On March 25, Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland announced that the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management would hold a wind energy auction to start to put that potential to work, offering more than 110,000 acres in the Carolina Long Bay area off the coast of North and South Carolina. The leases offered in this sale could result in 1.3 gigawatts or more of offshore wind energy for electricity customers in the Carolinas and beyond — enough to power nearly 500,000 American homes. 

“Offshore wind has a substantial role to play in our transition to a future society that runs entirely on clean and renewable energy,” said Emma Searson, Environment America Research & Policy Center’s 100% Renewable campaign director. “Today’s announcement is an exciting step toward that cleaner, brighter future.”

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Photo: With offshore wind alone, the Atlantic region could produce almost four times as much electricity as the region used in 2019. Credit: Eugene Suslo via Shutterstock

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Gideon Weissman and Bryn Huxley-ReicherFrontier Group; Matthew Casale and John Stout