By RenewaNews · Thursday, October 29, 2026 · 4 min read

Gulf of Maine's Floating Wind Pipeline Shrinks to Two Leases as BOEM Cancels Invenergy's Deepwater Tracts

Original illustration created for RenewaNews.

A thin auction to begin with

The October 29, 2024 lease sale offered eight areas in the Gulf of Maine call area. Bidders came for four. Secretary Deb Haaland called the sale a "critical step in our fight against climate change."

The combined capacity potential of the four sold areas was 6.8 GW, Utility Dive reported on October 30, 2024 — less than half the roughly 15 GW the full eight-lease offering could have supported. Reporter Diana DiGangi noted the sale brought in "$71 million less than the most recent fixed-bottom wind lease sale in the Central Atlantic," attributing the gap to "soaring costs, supply chain challenges and a construction accident" across the floating wind sector.

Shallow water, explicitly, was the point

Avangrid's own announcement on October 29, 2024 made the depth calculus explicit. CEO Pedro Azagra described the company's winning areas, OCS-A 0564 at 98,565 acres for $4.9 million and OCS-A 0568 at 124,897 acres for $6.2 million, as offering "relatively shallow waters within the limits of existing floating wind technology" and sites "largely deconflicted from other ocean users." Azagra framed the selection as a way to advance floating technology at "significant value."

The economics behind that caution were laid out by Habib Dagher of the University of Maine in an October 21, 2026 piece in the Maine Monitor. Dagher put the levelized cost of electricity for floating wind at "about double that of fixed-bottom wind" at the time of the auction. He described the industry as facing a "reality check," with developers pivoting away from the most challenging deep-water sites as the federal WindShot cost targets for floating wind ran into what the Monitor called substantial economic headwinds.

The cancellation, not the auction, is the real signal

BOEM's minimum bid floor of $50 per acre was itself a concession to how undeveloped the floating wind market was. In a September 16, 2024 response-to-comments document, BOEM defended that floor against fishing-industry objections that the acreage was undervalued, stating that "given the current state of the floating offshore wind industry," the low minimum was appropriate to encourage participation in a high-risk, emerging sector. The bureau also built in bidding credits tied to workforce training and fisheries mitigation — incentives designed to get bidders to the table at all.

Those incentives got four leases sold. The June 2026 settlement that terminated Invenergy's OCS-A 0562 and OCS-A 0567 came as the Department of the Interior implemented what BOEM's filing describes as a memorandum "temporarily halting offshore wind leasing on the Outer Continental Shelf" pending a review of federal practices. The two leases BOEM cancelled were also the deeper-water tracts from the original auction; the shallower pair, held by Avangrid, remains intact. BOEM's filing gives no causal explanation for the choice of which leases the settlement touched beyond the settlement language itself, so the correlation between depth and cancellation stops there. Neither BOEM's filing nor any public statement from Invenergy or Avangrid addresses what the settlement means for survey work or construction-and-operations-plan timelines on the two surviving leases.

Industry trade groups framed the original sale differently at the time. Liz Burdock, then CEO of Oceantic Network, called the auction a "vote of confidence" in an October 29, 2024 statement. Burdock's statement also acknowledged that the sale's success was concentrated in four specific areas totaling 400,000 acres, leaving the other four areas in the roughly 1-million-acre call area unbid. Anne Reynolds of the American Clean Power Association struck a similar note the same day, calling the sale the "first opportunity for deploying floating wind technology on the East Coast" while noting the projects remained in the "preliminary period" of a multi-year federal authorization process.

What's left on the water

Avangrid's 223,462 acres account for roughly 56% of the 400,000 acres Oceantic Network counted as sold in 2024, and roughly half of the $21,954,800 in winning bids. BOEM has not published lease-level capacity figures for the four original awards, so what fraction of the 6.8 GW estimate survives with Avangrid's two leases is not something the public record answers. Invenergy's exit removes its deeper-water acreage from the pipeline; what the settlement requires of either party, and whether Avangrid's remaining leases sit inside or outside the current leasing pause, is not addressed in any document reviewed for this story.