Saving Seafood

NOAA and BOEM announce joint strategy for fisheries surveys

December 5, 2022 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

NOAA Fisheries and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) are announcing a joint strategy to address potential impacts of offshore wind energy development on NOAA Fisheries’ scientific surveys. The Federal Survey Mitigation Strategy underscores the agencies’ shared commitment to the Biden-Harris Administration’s clean energy goals of responsibly advancing offshore wind energy production while protecting biodiversity and promoting ocean co-use. 

NOAA Fisheries’ surveys are essential for sustainably managing our nation’s fisheries. For 150 years, the agency’s scientists have collected survey data that form the basis of the science-based management of America’s federal fisheries, support the protection and recovery of marine mammals and endangered and threatened species, and increase understanding and conservation of coastal and marine habitats and ecosystems for future generations. 

“This joint strategy will help ensure the quality of NOAA’s fisheries surveys and data are maintained while the nation develops offshore wind energy,” said Janet Coit, assistant administrator for NOAA Fisheries, acting assistant secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere, and deputy NOAA administrator. “Our fisheries surveys allow NOAA to monitor important trends for individual species over time, with the broader goals of understanding marine ecosystems, particularly in the face of climate change, and supporting sustainable fisheries.” 

“BOEM values our partnership with NOAA to proactively address key challenges as we work together to achieve the Administration’s ambitious offshore wind goals,” said Amanda Lefton, BOEM director. “We are committed to incorporating the best available science into our decision making processes as we continue to advance the Biden-Harris administration’s goal of deploying 30 gigawatts of offshore wind energy by 2030. By taking an all-of-government approach, we can leverage the expertise and resources of our federal partners to ensure responsible development of offshore wind energy.”

During the environmental review of the first offshore wind energy project on the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf, BOEM and NOAA Fisheries identified major adverse impacts on surveys conducted in the Northeast region. In response, a draft survey mitigation strategy was developed and made available for public comment earlier this year. Now finalized, the strategy identifies the essential components of mitigating the impacts of offshore wind energy development on the surveys.

The five goals of the strategy are:

  • Mitigate impacts of offshore wind energy development on NOAA Fisheries surveys.
  • Evaluate and integrate, where feasible, wind energy development monitoring studies with NOAA Fisheries surveys.
  • Collaboratively plan and implement NOAA Fisheries survey mitigation with partners, stakeholders, and other ocean users using the principles of best scientific information available and co-production of knowledge, including fishermen’s local ecological knowledge and indigenous traditional ecological knowledge.
  • Adaptively implement this strategy recognizing the long-term nature of the surveys and the dynamic nature of wind energy development, survey technology and approaches, marine ecosystems and human uses of marine ecosystems.
  • Advance coordination between NOAA Fisheries and BOEM in the execution of this strategy and share experiences and lessons learned with other regions and countries where offshore wind energy development is being planned and underway.

The strategy — while focused on New England and the Mid-Atlantic — will serve as a model to address the impacts of offshore wind on NOAA Fisheries surveys in other regions. Nationally, NOAA Fisheries assesses the status of approximately 450 fishery stocks, 200 marine mammal stocks and 165 threatened and endangered species (recognizing that some marine mammals are also endangered). These assessments rely on more than 50 long-term, standardized surveys, many of which have been ongoing for more than 30 years.

Offshore wind energy development plays an important role in U.S. efforts to combat the climate crisis and build a clean energy economy. The White House has set a goal of significantly increasing the nation’s offshore wind energy capacity to 30 gigawatts by 2030 and an additional 15 gigawatts of floating offshore wind technology by 2035. 

BOEM is the lead federal agency responsible for leasing the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf for offshore energy development. NOAA Fisheries is responsible for stewardship of the nation’s living marine resources including fisheries, marine mammals, endangered and threatened species and their habitats and ecosystems. Both agencies share responsibilities for resource management, research, public engagement and other requirements related to promoting offshore wind energy development, protecting biodiversity and promoting ocean co-use.

North Carolina: Draft wind energy areas off NC coast may be downsized

December 6, 2022 — Proposed central East Coast offshore wind energy areas, including two off the northern North Carolina coast, may be scaled back in size by the time they are finalized early next year.

Sea scallop fishing, a NASA danger zone, a proposed shipping safety fairway, and marine habitat could further trim eight draft wind energy areas, or WEAs, the federal government is eyeing offshore from Delaware south to Cape Hatteras.

These areas encompass about 1.7 million acres, a little less than half of the original 3.9 million acres the Interior Department identified as potential wind energy areas.

Last month, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, or BOEM, opened a 30-day public comment period on the draft WEAs, including one area located about 28 miles offshore of southern Virginia and northern North Carolina and one about 50 miles from those coasts.

BOEM hosted two virtual meetings last week, giving members of the fishing community and environmental organizations an opportunity to ask questions about and comment on the draft WEAs.

Among some of the concerns raised during the meetings were potential impacts to Atlantic sea scallop fishing off Delaware’s coast and recreational fishing vessel businesses, possible effects on deep sea coral, and impacts to shorebirds and endangered right whales.

Offshore Wind – Not Maine Lobstering – Threatening Endangered Right Whales: Bloomberg

December 3, 2022 — Previously unseen government documents from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have revealed that the off-shore wind industry poses a severe threat to endangered right whales.

The documents, obtained by Bloomberg via Freedom of Information Act request, will provide ammunition to lobstermen and elected officials as they fight burdensome federal regulations on Maine’s most prized fishery.

Sean Hayes, the chief of the protected species branch at NOAA’s National Northeast Fisheries Science Center, explained the threat wind turbine construction and operation presents to the endangered mammals in a May 13 letter to to officials with the federal Interior Department.

“Additional noise, vessel traffic and habitat modifications due to offshore wind development will likely cause added stress that could result in additional population consequences to a species that is already experiencing rapid decline,” Hayes said in his letter, according to Bloomberg.

Read the full article at Maine Wire

Biden wants to launch 16 offshore wind farms. Can he?

December 1, 2022 — The agency tasked with realizing President Joe Biden’s offshore wind ambitions needs to move fast.

To meet the administration’s larger decarbonization goals, the White House wants to help raise 30 gigawatts of offshore wind power by 2030 — a pledge that will require pushing 16 individual wind farms through the regulatory gauntlet by the end of Biden’s first term.

So far, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management has only approved two of those farms.

“Industry is kind of concerned that projects aren’t quite getting through the permitting phase quick enough,” said Sam Salustro, vice president of strategic communications at the Business Network for Offshore Wind. “We really have to keep the pace up or even accelerate it to hit not only BOEM’s identified goals but our shared national goals.”

With the recent midterm elections ushering in a partial resurgence of GOP power on Capitol Hill, the pressure on the administration to future-proof the wind industry will only grow. This could become even more crucial if the levers of power fully flip with the 2024 election and a Republican president less keen on advancing renewables over fossil fuels is elected.

The politics matter because the offshore wind industry is at a pivotal moment — poised to rapidly expand in the United States but pressured by near-term challenges like rising costs and global competition for a limited number of resources to build and install thousands of turbines over the next decade (Climatewire, Nov. 15).

The pro-wind Biden administration has been a boon for many developers, who had grown skittish during the final days of President Donald Trump’s term, when progress in reviewing offshore wind farms ground to a halt and the sitting president uttered disparaging inaccuracies about the industry — like that noise generated from turbines cause cancer.

But despite the Biden administration’s aggressive policy blueprint for approving the first fleet of wind arrays off the nation’s coast, permitting takes time, a reflection of the pressure on the Interior Department’s small offshore energy agency as it seeks to build up its ranks.

“They’re building the muscle memory to do it, building up their capacity,” said Josh Kaplowitz, vice president of offshore wind at the American Clean Power Association and a former lawyer at Interior advising BOEM’s Office of Renewable Energy Programs. “It’s still a relatively new program.”

Permitting has long been a pinch point for offshore wind in the United States, where currently a two-turbine pilot project off the coast of Virginia is the only one that’s finished construction in federal waters. The five-turbine project near Block Island in Rhode Island is located in state waters.

The largest hurdle to getting projects to construction is BOEM’s completion of an environmental impact statement, or EIS, that consists of thousands of pages detailing a project’s specific impacts on everything from sea turtles and migratory birds to marine life and air quality. Each wind array’s construction and operations plan requires this environmental review, which BOEM says generally takes about two years to complete.

The two wind farms BOEM has advanced through the EIS to approval are Vineyard Wind off the coast of Massachusetts and South Fork Wind, which will serve New York. Both are scheduled to finish construction and start operating next year.

To date, wind developers have filed 17 other construction and operation plans with the bureau. Ten of those have entered the environmental review process. But only three projects have advanced to a draft EIS: proposed arrays off the coasts of Rhode Island, New York and New Jersey.

Most of the construction and operations plans that BOEM is fielding stacked up during the Trump administration, a backlog that helped inspire the Biden administration’s target of clearing 16 wind arrays by 2025.

When the Biden administration took over it was like “a dam that was released,” said Kaplowitz. “BOEM is playing catch-up.”

Since taking office, the Biden administration has marshaled resources to ease the growing logjam of projects, observers acknowledged, perhaps most importantly by working with Congress to direct cash to the bureau to hire dozens of new staff.

That’s been a priority for Amanda Lefton, a former New York state official who was appointed as BOEM director in February 2021 and immediately begin swelling the then-30-employee office of renewable energy programs (Greenwire, May 24).

BOEM has enlarged that crew, expanding to roughly 70 people. It’s also borrowed expertise to meet wind demand from regional offices like the one in the Gulf of Mexico — the bureau’s largest regional office and one historically focused on offshore oil and beach restoration.

Read the full article at E&E News

BOEM adapts Gulf of Mexico wind-energy planning process to central Atlantic areas

November 23, 2022 — The U.S. Bureau of Offshore Energy Management proposed eight new wind energy areas off the U.S. central Atlantic coast, totaling around 1.7 million acres, on Wednesday, 16 November.

The total area proposed for wind energy development was reduced from 3.9 million in the original proposal outlined by the Bureau of Offshore Energy Management earlier in 2022.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

BOEM adapts Gulf of Mexico wind planning to central Atlantic

November 21, 2022 — Eight proposed wind energy areas off the U.S. central Atlantic coast announced Wednesday total about 1.7 million acres, reduced from 3.9 million in the original call area outlined by the Bureau of Offshore Energy Management.

Ranging in distance 19 to 77 miles from the coasts of Delaware, Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina, the WEAs could be the first to venture to the edge of the East Coast outer continental shelf – potentially requiring use of floating turbines, if wind choose to bid on the most distant, deepest areas.

BOEM officials say they have been gathering information since the call area was released in April, from sources including the Central Atlantic Intergovernmental Renewable Energy Task Force; other federal agencies and the four states;  and input from Delaware, Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina State agencies; input from Federal agencies; and “comments from stakeholders and ocean users, including the maritime community, offshore wind developers, and the commercial fishing industry.”

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

Panelists say BOEM, fishing industry still far apart on offshore wind

November 21, 2022 — With the first offshore wind lease sales impending off California, the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and commercial fishermen still have a chasm to gap before the new and old industries can reasonably co-exist, panelists said at the Pacific Marine Expo in Seattle Friday.

BOEM’s early years of reviewing and permitting the first U.S. federal waters wind projects off southern New England failed to anticipate and head off conflicts with the region’s 400-year-old fishing industry, said Bonnie Brady, executive director of the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association.

While the 800-megawatt Vineyard Wind project is moving ahead, BOEM and the developers are still contending with a lawsuit brought by Northeast fishermen with the assistance of the Texas Public Policy Foundation.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

New York’s largest offshore wind farm takes key step

November 18, 2022 — New York regulators have granted approval for a 25-mile transmission that will carry power from the state’s largest offshore wind farm to a substation in Suffolk County, Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office on Thursday announced.

The transmission line approval by the New York State Public Service Commission is an important development for the proposed Sunrise Wind Farm off the coast of Long Island.

Read the full article at NY1

NEW JERSEY: Fiscal headwinds challenge offshore projects

November 16, 2022 — The offshore wind industry is facing new scrutiny as some initial proposals to build big wind farms off coastal waters are running into unforeseen fiscal challenges driven by high inflation, rising interest rates and continued constraints in the supply chain.

Those factors have led one company to ask to renegotiate its contract to build a 1,200-megawatt offshore wind farm in Massachusetts, a bid so far rejected by regulators there. They have also spurred Public Service Enterprise Group to reconsider its 25% investment in Ørsted’s 1,100-MW project to be built 15 miles off the Atlantic City coast.

Whether those issues are significant enough to slow New Jersey’s aggressive push to be a leader in the emerging industry remains to be seen, but there are critics who hope it does.

“The dirty secret of offshore wind is the economics don’t make sense,’’ said Mike Makarski, a spokesman for Affordable Energy of New Jersey, an organization that has been a persistent critic of the Murphy administration’s plan to shift to 100% clean energy by mid-century.

Read the full article at the New Jersey Spotlight News

Inflation’s next victim: U.S. offshore wind projects

November 15, 2022 — A rising tide of interest rates, supply chain bottlenecks and inflation is threatening the Biden administration’s ambitious offshore wind targets, creating a significant challenge for one of the president’s top climate priorities.

Recent weeks have seen a series of developers raise concerns over rising costs. In New Jersey, a developer warned earlier this month that a planned 98-turbine project off the coast of New Jersey could threaten its finances.

In New England, two developers with contracts to sell power to Massachusetts have sought to renegotiate the deals, only to get shot down by state regulators.

Many developers bid aggressively in state auctions to win those contracts but are now locked into agreements that didn’t account for rising costs, said Sam Huntington, director of North American power and renewables at S&P Global Commodity Insights.

The financial difficulties call into question the Biden administration’s goal of installing 30 gigawatts of offshore wind power by the end of this decade.

“We don’t see them hitting that,” Huntington said. “It is going to be something to watch. I don’t have a good sense of whether these will get renegotiated or canceled.”

The doubts are shared by other analysts. Bloomberg New Energy Finance sees the United States falling 3 to 4 GW short of its 2030 target due to long development timelines and an immature supply chain. The London-based renewables market intelligence firm Renewables Consulting Group estimates the United States will reach just over 25 GW by 2030.

Read the full article at E&E News