Saving Seafood

Offshore Wind Companies Are Racing To Develop America’s East Coast. First They Must Appease The Fishermen.

June 18, 2020 — On a windy stretch of ocean ten miles northeast of Martha’s Vineyard lies the watery grave of America’s first major offshore wind farm.

This is where a Boston-based company called Energy Management planned to build 130 Statue of Liberty-sized turbines, enough to supply power to 200,000 homes.

But the project known as Cape Wind never made it beyond the planning stages. Facing relentless opposition from wealthy homeowners on Nantucket Sound, including the billionaire industrialist William Koch and the late Democratic senator Ted Kennedy, it drowned in a sea of lawsuits over 16 years. Energy Management declared it dead in December 2017.

Cape Wind’s historic failure, even as Europe and Asia add more offshore wind farms every year, has become an infamous cautionary tale for the wind development industry. It seemed the US was destined to lag behind its peers.

Read the full story at Forbes

Lessons learned from Cape Wind

August 1, 2019 — History can offer hindsight and wisdom to present-day circumstances. The slow, but sure-moving U.S. offshore wind industry is one example. Although much of the sector is looking to Europe and the UK for experience and lessons learned, we can also look in our own backyard. Case in point: Cape Wind.

Remember the controversial project, which after a 16-year battle for developmental approval in Nantucket Sound, surrendered its federal lease area at the end of 2017? The proposal had a good run, and its eventual failure was certainly not for lack of effort.

Lauren Glickman, who works as a clean energy communications consultant — including with WRISE, the Women of Renewable Industries & Sustainable Energy — recalls directing a grassroots campaign in support of Cape Wind. “Working on a grassroots campaign in support of Cape Wind was a pivotal moment for me,” she shares. “It was an opportunity to work on a solution-oriented campaign for clean energy instead of just fighting against the fossil-fuel industry.”

Read the full story at Windpower Engineering & Development

Massachusetts: Concerns, support aired at offshore wind hearings in Hyannis, on Nantucket

April 20, 2018 — NANTUCKET, Mass. — Attendees at public hearings in Hyannis and on Nantucket Wednesday for one of three offshore wind energy projects proposed for south of Martha’s Vineyard had questions about the environment, potential jobs and the effects on commercial and recreational fishing.

But others fully welcomed the benefit of a renewable energy project that — unlike Cape Wind, they said — appears to have a chance of coming to fruition.

“I’m just hoping that this will be the beginning of a national shift,” said Nantucket resident Colin Wyatt Leddy, who said he was “terribly sorry” to see Cape Wind not succeed.

The Cape Wind project, once slated for Nantucket Sound, is in the midst of relinquishing its lease with the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.

With four public meetings under their belt, and a fifth in Kingston, Rhode Island today, Vineyard Wind executives are moving into the heavy lifting of federal permitting for their 400 to 800 megawatt project planned off the Vineyard.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times

 

Fishing industry proposes ‘reset’ for offshore wind energy

April 13, 2018 — With Massachusetts moving faster toward offshore wind energy, a national coalition of commercial fishing groups this week urged state officials to limit a first project to no more than 400 megawatts, and set up a new system for the seafood and offshore wind industries to jointly plan a way forward.

“We are pragmatic and we understand that we do not ‘own’ the ocean where these wind farms are being sited,” the National Coalition for Fishing Communities wrote in an April 9 letter to Massachusetts Gov. Charles D. Baker Jr.

“But we do not believe that a renewable resource like wind energy should be allowed to displace another renewable resource like wild fisheries. To guard against that outcome, a measured, restrained approach to the initial project size is best,” the letter stated. “It is irresponsible to allow construction of sizable wind farms without a deep understanding of their impacts.”

This month Massachusetts officials are looking to select an offshore wind development proposal to fit their plans for adding more renewable energy sources to the state’s power mix. The ill-fated Cape Wind plan to build turbines in Nantucket Sound was defeated by strenuous local opposition to siting in nearshore waters, and now proposals are over the horizon on federal offshore leases.

Read the full story at the National Fisherman

 

Massachusetts: Cape Cod drilling protesters dress to express

February 28, 2018 — BOSTON — They came dressed to make a public statement.

Brewster’s Christopher Powicki’s bearded face poked out of a plush full-length lobster costume. Kevin O’Brien of Boston was head-to-toe great white shark, and Don Mallinson of East Falmouth wore a cardboard tricorn hat — think homemade “Cheesehead” — with each side bearing an anti-oil and gas drilling message like “Exxon Valdez, Deepwater Horizon, New England.”

The U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management didn’t allow oral testimony at its public meeting Tuesday at the Sheraton Boston Hotel on a Trump administration proposal to open New England’s ocean waters to gas and oil exploration and extraction. While speakers lining up to give testimony at public hearings has been a familiar sight for other controversial proposals, like the defunct Cape Wind project, that practice ended for the bureau five years ago under the Obama administration.

That didn’t stop people from making their voices heard Tuesday. A costumed, sign-bearing crowd jammed into a conference room a floor above the agency’s public meeting rooms to listen to representatives from a panoply of environmental organizations, more than 20 nonprofit organizations, state elected officials, and others, speak in opposition to exploration and drilling anywhere off the New England coastline.

Their concerns ranged from the effects on everything from plankton to whales of seismic testing, which is used to pinpoint likely oil and gas deposits, and the possible effects of an oil spill on fisheries, marine life and our valuable coastline and tourist economy.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times

 

Massachusetts: Fed’s offshore oil plan raises local concerns

January 12, 2018 — The possibility of having an offshore oil rig a handful of miles from Cape beaches is drawing concern from elected officials and preservation groups.

The Trump administration at the turn of the new year released its draft proposal that would enable energy companies to lease large swaths of ocean and drill for oil and gas in federal waters off both coasts and in the Gulf of Mexico.

Federal waters typically begin three miles from shore.

“Reckless does not begin to describe the Trump Administration’s decision to expand offshore oil and gas drilling coast-to-coast. This unprecedented move ignores concerns expressed by military leaders and the deep and widespread bipartisan opposition voiced by municipal and state representatives,” Rep. William Keating (D-Ninth Congressional District) said in a Jan. 5 statement.

“Allowing this drilling threatens the safety of our waterfront communities, the health of our oceans, and the future of our climate – not to mention the havoc it could wreak on the local economies of coastal communities, like those across New England, who count on fresh fish and clean beaches for their seafood and tourism industries,” he added.

The five-year plan is detailed in a document titled “2019-2024 National Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Leasing Draft Proposed Program, and is online at boem.gov.

The proposal, a few hundred pages long and broken into geographic territories, shows Massachusetts in the northern Atlantic section. The draft proposes two leases in the north Atlantic.

Read the full story at the Wellfleet Wicked Local

 

Massachusetts: The final blow for Cape Wind

December 4, 2017 — The proposed Nantucket Sound wind farm is no longer.

After more than 16 years, tens of millions of dollars spent and seemingly endless, at times deafening, debate, the announcement Friday that Cape Wind is officially dead came quietly by email.

“Cape Wind has confirmed to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management that it has ceased development of its proposed offshore wind farm project in Nantucket Sound and has filed to terminate its offshore wind development lease that was issued in 2010,” according to a statement sent to the Times by Cape Wind vice president Dennis Duffy.

The project first proposed in 2001 and reviewed by dozens of local, state and federal agencies succumbed not under the weight of pressure from opponents or failure to clear any particular regulatory hurdle but rather from a combination of time and financial constraints that tightened and loosened over many years before constricting for good when utilities killed the contracts to buy power from the project’s 130 wind turbines in early January 2015.

Even after losing customers for its power, however, Cape Wind Associates LLC continued to shell out $88,278 to pay for a lease secured in 2010 covering 46 square miles of federal waters in the middle of the sound. That amount was a drop in the bucket compared to the more than $100 million the company had already spent on the project but whether it was what finally tipped the scales is unclear.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times

 

It’s Over: Cape Wind Ends Controversial Project

December 4, 2017 — Cape Wind Associates announced today that it has ceased the development of its proposed offshore wind farm and is surrendering its federal lease for 46 square miles in Nantucket Sound, officially putting an end to a 16-year effort to build the controversial project.

“Cape Wind has confirmed to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management that it has ceased development of its proposed offshore wind farm project in Nantucket Sound and has filed to terminate its offshore wind development lease that was issued in 2010,” according to a statement emailed to the Times by Cape Wind vice president Dennis Duffy.

The project was dealt a major setback in January 2015, when Eversource and National Grid ended those contracts to buy power from the turbines, and again in 2016 when the state Energy Facilities Siting Board declined to extend permits for the project that had originally been issued in 2009.

Opponents had argued the project was a danger to navigation, marine life, birds and the local economy. Proponents argued it was necessary to help combat climate change, would create jobs and would launch the country’s offshore wind energy industry.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times

 

East Coast Fishing Coalition Continues Legal Challenge to Planned Wind Farm Off New York

WASHINGTON — December 1, 2017 — The following was released by the Fisheries Survival Fund:

A coalition of East Coast fishing businesses, organizations, and communities, led by the Fisheries Survival Fund (FSF), has taken the next step in its legal challenge to a planned wind farm off the coast of New York. FSF and its co-plaintiffs argue that the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) awarded the lease for the New York Wind Energy Area (NY WEA) to Norwegian energy company Statoil without fully considering the impact on fishermen and other stakeholders, in neglect of its responsibilities as stewards of ocean resources.

The plaintiffs outlined their arguments in a brief filed Tuesday in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. In the brief, FSF criticizes BOEM’s claim that it is not the agency’s job to resolve conflicts among new and pre-existing ocean users in the NY WEA. In an October filing, BOEM wrote that it is “not the ‘government steward of the ‘ocean commons,’’” a claim that FSF calls “unbecoming.” In fact, BOEM’s own website states: “The bureau is responsible for stewardship of U.S. [Outer Continental Shelf] energy and mineral resources, as well as protecting the environment that development of those resources may impact.”

FSF also writes that the NY WEA, an expanse of ocean nearly twice the size of Washington, D.C., is a poor location for a wind farm, and that BOEM and Statoil have alternately claimed that it is both too early and too late to raise objections to the lease. Statoil previously stated that vacating the lease would “squander the resources and the five years that BOEM has expended to date in the leasing process,” even as BOEM promises it will consider measures to mitigate the impacts of a wind farm later in the process. By then, after more time and resources have been expended, a wind farm “will be all but a foregone conclusion,” FSF writes.

Additionally, FSF argues that evaluating alternatives and considering conflicting ocean uses from the start would ultimately benefit BOEM and energy developers, ensuring they do not expend vast resources developing poorly located wind farms. The brief cites the ongoing debacle over the Cape Wind energy project, an approved wind farm off Cape Cod, Massachusetts, as an example of what can go wrong when BOEM and a developer ram through an agreement and become too invested to turn back. After the project “slogged through state and federal courts and agencies for more than a decade,” delays and uncertainty have jeopardized, if not eliminated, Cape Wind’s financing and power purchase agreements, according to the brief.

The plaintiffs in this case are the Fisheries Survival Fund; the Borough of Barnegat Light, New Jersey; The Town Dock; Seafreeze Shoreside; Sea Fresh USA; Rhode Island Fishermen’s Alliance; Garden State Seafood Association; Long Island Commercial Fishing Association; the Town of Narragansett, Rhode Island; the Narragansett Chamber of Commerce; the City of New Bedford, Massachusetts; and the Fishermen’s Dock Co-Operative of Point Pleasant, New Jersey.

While the fishing groups hold wide-ranging views about offshore wind energy development, they all agree that the siting process for massive wind energy projects “should not be a land rush, but rather reasoned, fully informed, intelligent, and cognizant of the human environment,” according to the brief.

About the Fisheries Survival Fund
The Fisheries Survival Fund (FSF) was established in 1998 to ensure the long-term sustainability of the Atlantic sea scallop fishery. FSF participants include the vast majority of full-time Atlantic scallop fishermen from Maine to Virginia. FSF works with academic institutions and independent scientific experts to foster cooperative research and to help sustain this fully rebuilt fishery. FSF also works with the federal government to ensure that the fishery is responsibly managed.

Appeal filed objecting to continued lease of Sound to Cape Wind

November 30, 2017 — The Martha’s Vineyard Chamber of Commerce and the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah) are among those who have appealed a federal decision that reaffirmed Cape Wind’s long-term lease on 46 miles of Nantucket Sound, according to a press release.

The lease was reaffirmed in September despite the objections of dozens of stakeholders, including state and local leaders, the Aquinnah tribe, and the Steamship Authority, who all wrote letters to the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management objecting to the ongoing lease. Cape Wind had proposed 130 wind turbines for Nantucket Sound, but the project has been stalled by legal challenges, and utilities have walked away from power purchase plans.

Read the full story at the Martha’s Vineyard Times