Saving Seafood

Offshore wind is set to soar. Fishing groups want to pump the brakes.

March 14, 2022 — Offshore wind is finally taking off in the United States. But fishing interests around the country are throwing one last obstacle in the industry’s way.

The Biden administration has ambitious plans to open up vast swaths of coastline in order to generate 30 gigawatts of offshore wind energy by 2030. Energy companies are stepping up: Six leases off the New Jersey and New York coasts sold for $4.3 billion last month, the most lucrative wind lease sale in U.S. history.

But the wind industry and federal and state agencies still haven’t managed to placate the fishing industry, which is lobbying against offshore wind proposals around the country over concerns the turbines could interfere with fishing routes.

The resistance could complicate President Joe Biden’s timeline. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management wants to review at least 16 offshore wind plans for potential approval in the next three years, up from two total approvals since the agency was created in 2011.

Oregon officials are asking BOEM to delay a planned lease sale next year over concerns about its potential impacts on commercial fishing.

Read the full story at POLITICO

Offshore Wind Turbines Could Mess With Ships’ Radar Signals

March 3, 2022 — Offshore wind development has the potential to transform the nation’s energy supply by providing clean power directly to big coastal cities. In fact, the Biden administration is pushing to develop 30 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2030—enough to power 10 million homes and reduce carbon emissions by 78 million metric tons.

But a new study might throw a wrench in those plans. It turns out that massive wind turbines may interfere with marine radar systems, making it risky for both big ships passing through shipping channels near offshore wind farms and smaller vessels navigating around them. While European and Asian nations have relied on offshore wind power for more than a decade, the big wind farms proposed off the US continental shelf are larger and spaced further apart, meaning that ships are more likely to be operating nearby. These farms are proposed along the East Coast from Massachusetts to North Carolina, as well as for a handful of locations off the California coast, according to data from the US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.

A panel of experts convened by the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine concluded in a report issued last week that wind turbines can create two different problems. First, their steel towers can reflect electromagnetic waves, interfering with ships’ navigational radar systems in ways that might obscure a nearby boat.

Read the full story at Wired

BOEM Identifies Three Potential Wind Lease Areas Off Oregon

February 28, 2022 — The U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) has selected three areas off the coast of southern Oregon for potential offshore wind development, and its picks have attracted immediate opposition from fishermens’ advocacy organizations.

According to BOEM, the planning for the three call areas has been under way since late 2019. The initial call for information is a request for comments from stakeholders and the general public, and it is a prelude to the designation of specific lease areas. BOEM’s objective is to identify enough space for three gigawatts of near-term offshore wind power capacity.

The northernmost call area is located just off Coos Bay, Oregon, one of the largest commercial fishing ports in the region. It is also the largest of the three areas – about 1,360 square miles – and the area with the greatest total potential for energy generation. The southernmost call area, near Brookings, has the highest average wind speeds and the lowest levelized cost of energy.

Read the full story at the Maritime Executive

Seafood industry reacts to BOEM offshore call areas in Oregon

February 28, 2022 — The following was released by the West Coast Seafood Processors Association:

Offshore wind energy is coming to Oregon, according to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, but the seafood industry says it’s an oncoming windstorm.

BOEM plans to announce Friday, Feb. 25, 2022, three proposed “call areas” off Oregon. BOEM identifies these ocean areas with high wind potential as places companies might want to develop to harness the energy of offshore wind. These massive areas, covering 2,181 square miles, already are utilized by the fishermen to harvest nutritious, sustainable seafood proteins.

As part of its process, BOEM will solicit interest from wind energy developers before doing a basic environmental assessment of the areas. Comprehensive environmental studies will be completed later, after leases are already issued and enormous investments are already made.

“The effect of offshore wind development on fisheries, the habitat and the California Current is unknown. Placing giant turbines and anchors in a current system that is largely free-flowing and structure-free could cause irreparable harm to seabirds, marine mammals, fisheries management regimes and more,” Southern Oregon Ocean Resource Coalition (SOORC) Chair Susan Chambers said. “Robust environmental analyses need to be completed before areas are identified and leased, not after. Our productive California Current must be protected.

One area, known to commercial fishermen as “the mud hole” is known to be a highly productive shrimp bed, as well as a key area for sole harvested by groundfish fishermen. It is also recognized as an important feeding area for seabirds.

Fishermen already are questioning the value of placing turbines in areas off Morro Bay and Humboldt Bay, Calif. The early environmental analyses and area identification memos of those areas included very little socio-economic data regarding the potential effects on the seafood industry and no consideration of the cumulative impacts of potential additional wind farms off the U.S. West Coast.

“These turbines are going to blow me off the water,” Fishermen’s Marketing Association President Travis Hunter said. Hunter and his family have fished for years off southern Oregon and northern California and in the Humboldt Wind Energy Area. “These areas will displace hard-working fishermen.”

The seafood industry recognizes the value in renewable energy, but at what cost? Fishermen and processors have their roots in coastal communities. Displacing them in favor of large out-of-town – and frequently out-of-country – companies is a net loss.

“Developers are largely funded by foreign companies. Most of the profits, at Oregon taxpayers’ expense, will be funneled overseas. This is not ‘the Oregon way,’” Shrimp Producers Marketing Cooperative Secretary Nick Edwards said.

The future of several Oregon commercial fisheries, processors, fishery-related businesses, and the economic development coastal communities derive from those industries, hang in the balance.

“This is what results from government agency lip service versus authentic engagement,” said Heather Mann, Director of the Midwater Trawlers Cooperative. She was speaking in response to last night’s revelation that the Bureau of Energy and Management’s Oregon (BOEM) call areas for offshore wind energy development cover more than 2,000 square miles of productive fishing grounds in Southern Oregon. “BOEM has essentially chosen prime fishing areas for turbines threatening not just Oregon harvesting and processing jobs, but food security as well.”

Fishing groups all along the West Coast have been pleading with BOEM to have a seat at the table, not be a mime in the check-the-box outreach that often happens with government agencies.

“The importance of where these gigantic, floating wind farms are placed cannot be under-emphasized. If we do not get this decision absolutely correct, the fallout could have a dire domino economic effect on all Oregon commercial fisheries, including the vitally important Oregon Dungeness crab fishery,” Oregon Dungeness Crab Commission Executive Director Hugh Link said.

Read the release here

Oregon fishing advocates organize to pressure BOEM on offshore wind

February 28, 2022 — Solicitation by U.S. federal energy planners of wind-energy developer interest offshore of the U.S. state of Oregon has the state’s commercial fishing advocates organizing to push for major environmental analysis before any decision-making takes place.

“The effect of offshore wind development on fisheries, the habitat and the California Current is unknown. Placing giant turbines and anchors in a current system that is largely free-flowing and structure-free could cause irreparable harm to seabirds, marine mammals, fisheries management regimes and more,” Southern Oregon Ocean Resource Coalition Chair Susan Chambers said in a joint statement with other groups. “Robust environmental analyses need to be completed before areas are identified and leased, not after. Our productive California Current must be protected.”

Read the full story from SeafoodSource

 

Bidding tops $3.3 billion in New York Bight wind lease sale

February 25, 2022 — The biggest U.S. offshore wind energy lease sale ever will continue Friday, after two days of steadily escalating bids that topped at $3.3 billion with no clear winners at 6 p.m. Thursday.

After 46 rounds of bidding that began at 9 a.m. Feb. 23, the most-sought of six lease tracts – dubbed OCS-0539, east-southeast of Barnegat Light, N.J. – attracted up to five bidders at a time who pushed offers to $900 million.

After running the bids at 20-minute intervals, Bureau of Ocean Energy Management officials said they will resume at 9 a.m. Friday. The agency will announce provisional winners of the online auction.

Covering 488,201 acres, the sale is the largest of the Biden administration and the first wind auction since 2018. Farther east from areas already leased to developers off New Jersey, the new leases roughly double the New York Bight acreage available for building wind turbine arrays.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

 

The US Is Turning an Area Half the Size of Rhode Island Into a Wind Farm

February 25, 2022 —  The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) is entering the second day of a long awaited sale of nearly a half-million acres of land for offshore wind infrastructure.

488,201 acres of land off the coast of Long Island and New Jersey—a region known as the New York Bight—went up for sale at 9 a.m. on Wednesday. Over the course of the day, six regions of land were offered to an approved list of 25 bidders that include oil and gas giants like Equinor and BP, and a number of smaller, local renewable energy companies like Atlantic Shores Offshore Wind and Bight Wind Holdings.

14 of these approved bidders showed up, the BOEM told Motherboard. Bids are ongoing, updated live on the BOEM website, and, across the six regions, have ranged from $4.3-million in the first round to $410-million in the 21st round. Bidding will continue on Thursday at 9 a.m.

It’s the largest area ever offered in a single auction, estimated to result in 5.6 to 7 gigawatts of renewable energy, enough to power 2-million homes, per a press release the Department of the Interior issued with the announcement of the auction in January. Deb Haaland, secretary of the interior, called the move a “once-in-a-generation opportunity to fight climate change and create good-paying union jobs” in the announcement.

“We are at an inflection point for domestic offshore wind energy development,” Haaland said in the release. “We must seize this moment – and we must do it together.”

Read the full story at Vice

 

U.S. offshore wind auction bids top $1.5 bln, with more to come

February 24, 2022 — The largest ever U.S. sale of offshore wind development rights – for areas off the coasts of New York and New Jersey – attracted a record $1.5 billion in bids on Wednesday, supporting President Joe Biden’s plan to create a new domestic industry.

The auction, which will continue on Thursday, is the first offshore wind lease sale under Biden, who has made expansion of offshore wind a cornerstone of his plans to tackle global warming and decarbonize the U.S. electricity grid by 2035, while creating tens of thousands of jobs.

After 21 rounds of bidding, combined live bids for the six leases stood at nearly $1.54 billion, according to updates posted on the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s (BOEM) web site.

That easily topped the U.S. offshore wind auction record of $405 million set in 2018. It was also far more than recent oil and gas auctions in U.S. federal waters. A sale of drilling rights in the Gulf of Mexico late last year, for instance, attracted $191.7 million in high bids.

Read the full story at Reuters

BOEM looks at fishermen compensation — but not everyone wants it

February 24, 2022 — Recent detailed proposals from the Fisheries Survival Fund and Responsible Offshore Development Alliance – coalitions of the commercial fishing industry – and the American Clean Power Association representing the offshore wind industry, presented the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management priority lists for their industries’ coexistence.

Some of those recommendations distinguish between ‘mitigation’ – avoiding conflicts between wind development and fishing – and ‘compensation’ – paying to make up for fishermen being displaced from longtime fishing grounds.

Fishing advocates say BOEM should be following a “mitigation hierarchy” under the National Environmental Policy Act to “avoid, minimize, mitigate and compensate” for impacts of offshore wind development.

BOEM officials and wind energy advocates say that’s being done. As examples they point to modifications to the South Fork Wind project east of Montauk, N.Y., to preserve critical bottom habitat, and shifts in the New York Bight wind energy lease areas to reduce conflicts with the scallop fleet.

Read the full story at WorkBoat

Rep. Pingree, New England lawmakers urge Biden administration to study sustainable offshore wind development

February 22, 2022 — Rep. Chellie Pingree and other New England lawmakers are pressuring federal ocean regulators charged with siting offshore wind energy projects to pay close attention to the health of Gulf of Maine ecosystems and fishermen.

Pingree chairs a House Appropriations subcommittee that oversees the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s budget, and she’s concerned that with the Biden administration’s push to open up new offshore leases as soon as 2024, the gulf’s ecosystems and economies might get overlooked.

Read the full story at Maine Public