Saving Seafood

NEW YORK: NYSERDA chief to feds: No wind farms off Hamptons

April 9, 2021 — New York State will emphasize its position that windfarms off the Hamptons are a nonstarter as federal regulators begin the public process of auctioning off lease rights to waters off the South Shore.

Doreen Harris, the newly named president and chief executive of the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, in an interview Thursday, said the state next week will make a detailed case for instead focusing on two other wind areas to the west. Harris had previously been acting chief executive of NYSERDA.

The U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, in a highly anticipated announcement last month, released a map of proposed new wind-energy areas off New York and New Jersey in a body of water known as the New York Bight.

Read the full story at Newsday

Don’t Forget Fishermen in the Rush To Expand Wind Energy

April 8, 2021 — On April 6th, 1,665 members of fishing communities in every U.S. coastal state submitted a letter to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) and National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) requesting a transparent and balanced national planning process for offshore wind development.

Offshore wind development poses direct conflicts with fishing and the current permitting process provides no meaningful opportunity to include the needs of sustainable seafood harvesting and production in strategies to mitigate climate change. Recent interagency announcements to fast-track offshore wind energy production have provided no commitments to address this transgression of the federal government’s public trust duties.

On the eve of the expected Record of Decision for the Vineyard Wind I project, which would be the first commercial-scale offshore wind energy project in U.S. federal waters, the signers request that BOEM adopt reasonable and consistently requested fisheries mitigation measures for the project if it is approved.

Read the full story at OCNJ Daily

RODA says it’s being ignored

March 31, 2021 — With America’s first industrial-scale offshore wind farm poised to receive final approval from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), fishermen continue to have reservations about potential impacts.

Vineyard Wind 1, an 84-turbine wind farm to be situated in the Atlantic 15 miles south of Aquinnah, is expected to get that final approval — a record of decision — from BOEM within a month.

Responsible Offshore Development Alliance (RODA), a coalition representing fishing interests, has taken issue with the project from the get-go, notably the transit corridors. These are the lanes between turbine towers vessels would navigate through. Vineyard Wind and other developers that have leased sections of New England ocean for wind development have agreed to 1-nautical-mile transit lanes. RODA has long demanded wider lanes, preferably four miles wide.

That stance hasn’t changed, RODA’s executive director, Annie Hawkins, told The Times. Hawkins said a recommendation for wider lanes could have emerged from the project’s environmental impact statement, but that didn’t happen. Hawkins said the safe passage of fishing vessels, especially those towing any sort of mobile gear, is in question with the current spacing layout. It’s unknown if insurers will allow fishing vessels to travel inside Vineyard Wind 1 or the farms that will follow, Hawkins said.

Read the full story at the MV Times

Biden administration aims for vast offshore wind expansion

March 30, 2021 — Top Biden administration officials on Monday outlined new goals for building 30,000 megawatts off offshore wind energy generation by 2030, including another wind energy area covering nearly 800,000 acres in the New York Bight.

The Bureau of Offshore Energy Management announced it will initiate its environmental impact statement process for the Ocean Wind project, Ørsted’s planned 1,100 MW array off New Jersey, as the agency recently started an EIS for the South Fork wind development south of Rhode Island and just weeks after finalizing its analysis for the 804 MW Vineyard Wind project in southern New England waters.

Environmental reviews could start for as many as 10 more projects this year, the agency said.

The waters between the New Jersey beaches and Long Island already include federal lease held by developers intending to build the Atlantic Shores turbine array off Atlantic City, and the Empire Wind project close to the New York Harbor approaches. BOEM has been gauging potential developer interest in areas farther offshore and said it will now begin an environmental assessment of those areas.

With 20 million inhabitants in the region, it’s “the largest population center in the United States” with an enormous energy market, said Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, who spoke of the opportunity for U.S. shipbuilders and other industries in a new energy sector.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Biden Administration Announces a Major Offshore Wind Plan

March 29, 2021 — The Biden administration on Monday announced a plan to vastly expand the use of offshore wind power along the East Coast, aiming to tap a potentially huge new source of renewable energy that has so far struggled to gain a foothold in the United States.

The plan sets a goal of deploying 30,000 megawatts of offshore wind turbines in coastal waters nationwide by 2030, enough to power 10 million homes. To help meet that target, the administration said it would accelerate permitting of projects off the Atlantic Coast and prepare to open up waters near New York and New Jersey for development. The administration also plans to offer $3 billion in federal loan guarantees for offshore wind projects and invest in upgrading the nation’s ports to support wind construction.

The moves come as President Biden prepares a roughly $3 trillion economic recovery package that will focus heavily on infrastructure to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and tackle climate change, an effort he has framed as a jobs initiative. Officials made a similar case on Monday, saying offshore wind deployment would create 44,000 new jobs directly in the offshore wind sector, such as building and installing turbines, as well as 33,000 new indirect jobs.

Read the full story at The New York Times

RODA circulating comment letter on offshore wind policy

March 23, 2021 — The undersigned fishing community members submit these requests to National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) and Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), noting the unclear decision authority since January’s revocation of the “One Federal Decision” policy that streamlined federal permitting of offshore wind energy (OSW) and other large infrastructure projects.

We stand willing to work with the Administration to use our knowledge about ocean ecosystems to create innovative, effective solutions for climate and environmental change. There are opportunities for mutual wins, however, OSW is an ocean use that directly conflicts with fishing and imposes significant impacts to marine habitats, biodiversity, and physical oceanography. Far more transparency and inclusion must occur when evaluating if OSW is a good use of federal waters.

However, we must be treated as partners, not obstacles. We’ve dutifully come to the table, despite the irony of the “table” being set by newcomers in our own communities employing the finely honed “stakeholder outreach” tactics of their oil and gas parent companies. We’ve diligently commented on the major conflicts and concerns of offshore wind development and taken valuable time off the water for countless one-sided meetings under false hope that our knowledge mattered. Scientific efforts from fishing experts are improving, although they need more funding and time. We can point to few, if any, other true considerations we’ve received.

We need a national strategy before OSW development. This could be modeled off Rhode Island’s Ocean Special Area Management Plan, which created an inclusive state process for holistic OSW planning. OSW decisions must be based on cost-benefit analyses, alternative ways to address carbon emissions, food productivity, and ocean health. BOEM may approve a dozen project plans this year, and new leases appear imminent from Hawaii to California, South Carolina to the New York Bight and Gulf of Maine. New technologies allow OSW deployment in all US waters in the near future, and planning is occurring in the Gulf of Mexico and Pacific Northwest. Selling off our oceans with no strategy to protect food security threatens all of us.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Deb Haaland Becomes First Native American Cabinet Secretary

March 16, 2021 — Representative Deb Haaland of New Mexico made history on Monday when the Senate confirmed her as President Biden’s secretary of the Interior, making her the first Native American to lead a cabinet agency.

Ms. Haaland in 2018 became one of the first two Native American women elected to the House. But her new position is particularly redolent of history because the department she now leads has spent much of its history abusing or neglecting America’s Indigenous people.

Beyond the Interior Department’s responsibility for the well-being of the nation’s 1.9 million Native people, it oversees about 500 million acres of public land, federal waters off the United States coastline, a huge system of dams and reservoirs across the Western United States and the protection of thousands of endangered species.

“A voice like mine has never been a Cabinet secretary or at the head of the Department of Interior,” she wrote on Twitter before the vote. “Growing up in my mother’s Pueblo household made me fierce. I’ll be fierce for all of us, our planet, and all of our protected land.”

Read the full story at The New York Times

America’s biggest offshore wind farm is on the verge of federal approval

March 11, 2021 — America’s offshore wind infrastructure is modest: the only turbines in the ocean today power a small community’s worth of homes from a wind farm off Block Island. But within two years, the number of American homes powered by the renewable energy source could grow to nearly half a million.

Vineyard Wind CEO Lars Pedersen says an environmental review released by the federal government this week brings the company closer to its goal of supplying 800 megawatts of electricity to New England’s grid by 2023.

“More than three years of federal review and public comment is nearing its conclusion and 2021 is poised to be a momentous year for our project and the broader offshore wind industry,” Pedersen said.

The much-anticipated study from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management found the only major environmental impact from the turbines would be felt in the region’s commercial fisheries.

Many fishermen fear Vineyard Wind is leaving too narrow a distance between turbines for vessels to safely navigate during bad weather. Annie Hawkins, director of the seafood industry-backed Responsible Offshore Development Alliance, said the federal government has also failed to set guidelines for compensating fishing crews that will lose access to squid and lobsters they once caught in Vineyard Wind’s 118-square-mile lease area.

Read the full story at The Public’s Radio

Offshore Energy Gets a Second Wind Under Biden

March 11, 2021 — The Biden Administration is betting that green energy produced by new offshore wind farms will help slow climate change, but fishers and some scientists say there are too many uncertainties about how the massive structures will affect the ocean and its marine life. The first big test of how the push for wind energy might clash with ocean conservation will likely play out in Massachusetts waters. This week, Department of the Interior officials gave initial approval to the $2.8 billion Vineyard Wind project located about 15 miles south of the island of Martha’s Vineyard.

Once the massive wind turbines begin operating in 2023, the wind farm is expected to generate 800 megawatts of clean electricity. That’s enough to power 400,000 Massachusetts homes and businesses.

Vineyard Wind will be the first big offshore wind farm on the East Coast, although smaller pilot projects are running off Block Island, Rhode Island, and Virginia Beach, Virginia. Officials at the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, an office within the Department of the Interior, are reviewing another 12 commercial offshore wind projects between Maryland and Maine. If approved, those wind farms would generate 25 gigawatts of clean energy for the power-hungry Northeast, more than doubling all land-based wind power coming online in 2021.

Read the full story at Wired

U.S. Department of Interior Jump Starts Vineyard Wind, Inking Final Environmental Impact Statement

March 10, 2021 — In a major boost for Vineyard Wind, the U.S. Department of Interior announced Monday that a long-awaited environmental analysis of the plan to build the first commercial-scale offshore wind farm 12 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard is complete.

The announcement signals a sea change in the outlook for the emerging offshore wind industry under the Biden administration, and it puts the $2 billion Vineyard Wind I project solidly back on track to be first in the race to harness hundreds of square miles of ocean for the development of renewable energy.

“The United States is poised to become a global clean energy leader,” said Laura Daniel Davis, principal deputy assistant secretary for land and minerals management, in a press release Monday.

Completed by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the final environmental impact statement is due to be published in the Federal Register later this week, the announcement said.

Read the full story at the Vineyard Gazette