April 18, 2024 — Right now, 60 percent of the electricity in the United States is generated by fossil fuel, compared to 21 percent renewables. Of the latter, wind power accounts for a little over 10 percent, according to the latest data provided by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. But in March 2021, President Joe Biden announced his administration would marshal the resources of the federal government to meet a new clean energy goal: deploy thirty gigawatts of offshore wind in the United States by 2030, “while protecting biodiversity and promoting ocean co-use.”
The waters off the New England coast will be particularly busy. Currently, there are nine active leases for wind farms, stacked diagonally in a grid of turbines placed one nautical mile apart, covering a roughly 909,000-nautical-square-mile area about fifteen miles south of the Rhode Island coast, midway between Block Island and Martha’s Vineyard. To date, BOEM has approved the constructionand operation plans for two projects, Revolution Wind and South Fork Wind, both developed by Danish renewable energy company Ørsted with partner Eversource, which has since sold its stake in those projects. Revolution, a sixty-five-turbine farm, will deliver power to 350,000 homes in Rhode Island and Connecticut. South Fork, with twelve turbines, will deliver power to 70,000 Long Island homes. A third lease — the Sunwise Wind project, with eighty-four turbines — is in the early stages.
The fishing industry fears the effects on fish stocks and fishing. For example, on the sea surface, the spacing of the turbines can create navigational hazards; below, the displacement of boulders on the sea floor to lay transmission cables can create obstructions to nets, says Fred Mattera, who is executive director of the Commercial Fisheries Center of Rhode Island and has served as a fisheries representative on the construction plans and compensation packages for offshore wind farm projects. In September, the entire Rhode Island Fishermen’s Advisory Board quit in protest after the CRMC granted its approval to Ørsted’s Sunrise project.
“We love to build and deal with the consequences later. We have stakeholders that represent half a billion dollars and thousands of jobs in the fishing community,” Mattera says. “Are we willing to give that up? I do believe there will be damage to the ecosystem because there’s too many uncertainties.”