The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management will hold an auction for areas off Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts coasts.

New England fishermen are steaming over a final sale notice from the feds for nearly 1 million acres in the Gulf of Maine designated as a hub for wind energy, even with the area much smaller than initially sought.

The announcement follows the government’s recent announcement that it has approved more than 15 gigawatts of clean energy from offshore wind projects since the start of the Biden-Harris administration — equivalent to half of the capacity needed to achieve President Biden’s goal of 30 gigawatts of offshore wind energy by 2030.

Six of the potential wind plots are located off outer Cape Cod. The remaining two sites are off the Maine coast. In total, the sites encompass about 850,000 acres, about 120,000 fewer acres than initially proposed earlier this year.

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management will hold an auction for offshore wind leases in the Gulf of Maine in late October, it announced Monday.

#IndustryNews Yesterday, @BOEM announced the first offshore wind lease sale in the Gulf of Maine. A FSN was issued for an October 29 auction that encompasses 8 areas and over 800,000 acres, enough space to construct 13 GW of power generation. Read more: https://t.co/dBGhWzprIv pic.twitter.com/AF1YUHUHtU