October 22, 2021 — Some Jersey Shore people who recovered and rebuilt their homes after Hurricane Sandy say projects like Atlantic Shores Offshore Wind must be part of the renewable-energy answer to climate change and rising sea levels. The storm legacy loomed large in this week’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management scoping sessions.
The New Jersey shoreline “is in critical danger of being destroyed by climate change,” said marine science teacher Amy Williams of the New Jersey Organizing Project, a community group that arose after Sandy struck in October 2012.
For others, the prospect of 800-foot turbine towers on the horizon 10 miles off Long Beach Island presages another kind of disaster.
The location is “completely inappropriate” said Wendy Kouba of the LBI Coalition for Wind Without Impact, a group calling for BOEM to include its Hudson South wind energy area – 30 to 57 miles offshore – as an alternate site in the environmental impact study for Atlantic Shores.
With two major offshore wind projects – the Atlantic Shores joint venture by Shell New Energies US LLC and EDF Renewables North America, and Ørsted’s Ocean Wind on a neighboring lease to the south off Atlantic City – New Jersey has become a battleground for the wind industry’s fiercest critics and supporters.
Commercial fishing conflicts are one major issue for the New Jersey projects. Barnegat Light and Cape May are ports for the thriving sea scallop fishery, while large volumes of surf clams are landed in Atlantic City, Wildwood and Point Pleasant Beach.
Both fleets have engaged with BOEM and wind developers for years, foreseeing their dredge boats could be effectively excluded from future turbine arrays with their towers and buried power cables.
Read the full story at National Fisherman