October 31, 2018 — A four-year study of planned wind energy areas off the East Coast found that building and operating offshore wind energy arrays could affect some of the region’s most commercially valuable fish species.
The report by scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was written to help the federal Bureau of Offshore Energy Management to evaluate development plans for eight offshore wind energy leases issued by the agency.
Those areas, extending from the largest proposals to date off southern New England to North Carolina, represent just about 2.7% of what NOAA Fisheries defines as the Northeast U.S. Continental Shelf Large Marine Ecosystem, according to the report. Since then four more leases have been issued, for a dozen proposed wind developments in all.
“While the extent of the WEAs (wind energy areas) may appear small in comparison with the entire system, it is the largest pre-planned anthropogenic (man-made) development in the coastal ocean in this region,” the authors note. “Further, the LME is not homogeneous, so that the effects of WEA development can potentially have impacts out of proportion to its small size.”