"Federal officials will hold an auction in January for the rights to build wind turbines off Massachusetts’s shore, the largest sale of its kind.

The 742,000-acre area is south of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, and could provide up to 5 gigawatts of wind power, enough for 1.4 million homes, said the Interior Department, which manages federal offshore energy.

'This will be our largest competitive lease sale to date for offshore wind energy development,' Interior Secretary Sally Jewell said in a Monday statement, thanking officials from Massachusetts and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which is part of Interior."

Timothy Cama reports for The Hill November 24, 2014. [2]