July 28, 2022 — Developers of the first New Jersey offshore wind project say they will spend almost $13 million for fisheries monitoring surveys in cooperation with three universities.
Ocean Wind 1, an 1,100-megawatt project 15 miles off Atlantic City, N.J., now includes a fisheries monitoring plan developed along guidelines from the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, according to a statement Wednesday from wind developers Ørsted.
The plan is built around a suite of seven monitoring projects with Rutgers University, Delaware State University and Monmouth University. One will be a first-of-its-kind study for U.S. offshore wind, using environmental DNA from ocean sampling to monitor and assess local fish abundance and biodiversity in the Ocean Wind 1 lease area.
Research work has begun before construction and will proceed at sea on local commercial fishing vessels, during six years through project construction and after.
The five-turbine, 30 MW Block Island pilot project began in 2016 and became an attraction for recreational fishing, with black sea bass and other fish drawn to the new underwater structure.
The scale and impact of Ocean Wind 1 on fisheries is a subject of intense debate.
Recent studies from Rutgers researchers found that planned wind turbine arrays could displace the Mid-Atlantic based surf clam industry enough to reduce its revenue by 15 percent. That loss could be as much as 25 percent for boats based at Atlantic City, a historic hub for the fleet, the researchers estimated.
“The structure of this part of the ocean, the Middle Atlantic Bight continental shelf, is unique among oceanic provinces due to its extreme seasonal temperature range and vertical layering. Migration and ranging are an important part of fish life cycles here as a result, and this makes it challenging to tease out responses to the wind farm specifically,” said the lead principal investigator Thomas Grothues, an associate research professor in the Department of Marine and Coastal Sciences of Rutgers-New Brunswick’s School of Environmental and Biological Sciences.