Construction and operations plan for wind project offshore New England secures US federal government approval

The US federal government, through the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), has approved Sunrise Wind's plan for construction and operations. This is the project's final approval from BOEM, following the Department of the Interior's March 2024 Record of Decision on the project.

The Sunrise Wind project will be located south of Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, and east of Block Island, Rhode Island. It will have a total capacity of 924 MW of clean, renewable energy that could power more than 320,000 homes per year. BOEM received important feedback on the project's potential environmental impacts through government-to-government consultations with Tribes, input from federal, state and local agencies, and from public meetings and comments.

Since 2021, the Department of the Interior has approved the first eight commercial-scale offshore wind energy projects in federal waters with a combined capacity of more than 10 GW of clean energy—enough to power nearly four million homes. BOEM has held four offshore wind lease auctions, including sales in the New York New Jersey region, offshore the Carolinas, and the first-ever sales offshore the Pacific and Gulf of Mexico.