NPR.

So this year in the late summer,

So this year in the late summer, Salata was in his New Orleans office early.

While there was a hurricane that happened to be brewing in the Gulf of Mexico,

Mike was fixated on his screen for another big event for the Gulf.

Mike had helped set up the first ever auction for offshore wind farms in the region.

He works for the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, that's a government

agency that manages how the sea, owned by the government, is used for things like

drilling oil or gas. It was leasing out patches of water for companies to build giant wind

turbines in the water and sell their electricity. It was a lot of

anticipation. We were just waiting to see what those first bids would be, a

lot of excitement.

A lot of excitement, and you can hear it in his voice.

I mean, look, Mike is a steady hand on this big government work, so he's appropriately

measured. But this auction could mean pretty high bids.

A similar patch of ocean near New York had gone for over a billion dollars

and when Mike had asked around with developers about interest in this Gulf site,

We had a very good response, so we thought that they would be competitive interest.

But the sea patches did not go for anywhere near a billion dollars.

One of the three sites sold for five and a half million that's well under one percent of New

York's and two didn't even get any offers. This is the indicator from

Planet Money I'm Darren Woods and I'm Whelan Wong. Today on the show how did this

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