In 2013, the United States Bureau of Ocean Energy Management held its first competitive auction for commercial offshore wind development leases in the waters off Massachusetts and Rhode Island, marking the formal launch of the American offshore wind industry after years of planning delays. The winning bids for areas of the Atlantic Outer Continental Shelf demonstrated investor confidence in offshore wind as a commercially viable energy source in American waters. This auction opened the way for the major offshore wind projects subsequently planned for the New England coast and the Mid-Atlantic, including the Cape Wind and Vineyard Wind projects off Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

The American offshore wind debate generated intense literary and cultural engagement, particularly in New England, where the wind-swept Atlantic coast has been central to American poetry from Walt Whitman's Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking to the seafaring imagery of Robinson Jeffers, Elizabeth Bishop, and Mary Oliver. The controversy over the Cape Wind project, proposed in the waters visible from Henry David Thoreau's beloved Cape Cod, invoked a direct tension between the nature-writing legacy of Thoreau and the renewable energy imperatives of the twenty-first century, debated extensively in environmental literature and poetry journals. Wind energy's intersection with cherished literary landscapes became a major theme in American ecopoetry.