Saving Seafood

BOEM, NOAA release plan to mitigate wind energy impacts on US fisheries

December 7, 2022 — The U.S. government on Monday, 5 December, unveiled a cross-agency plan to reduce the impact offshore wind energy sites may have on fishery surveys. However, questions remain on how NOAA Fisheries and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) will be able to completely fund the initiative.

According to a 37-page NOAA technical memorandum, the Federal Survey Mitigation Strategy is designed to come up with ways to ensure population counts conducted by boats and airplanes are not hindered by the construction and deployment of wind turbines in federal waters. While it currently relates to projects in New England and the Mid-Atlantic, federal officials said they believe it will have use in other regions as the government looks to develop offshore wind farms in other parts of the country.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

How offshore wind won over (most of) the Hamptons

December 7, 2022 — Bill Fielder usually has the beach to himself in December.

He arrives in the mornings, letting his dogs burst from the car onto the empty sand. He takes a seat on a wooden bench and puffs a cigar as he watches them romp. Sometimes another dog walker will pass by. Maybe a truck, fishing pole strapped to the roof, rumbles onto the beach. But that’s usually it.

Except this year.

A 177-foot liftboat recently anchored a short distance offshore, its three towering legs looming over the dunes, as well as the neatly lined hedgerows and sun-blanched mansions of the Hamptons.

On the narrow road leading to the beach, a drilling crew is working in front of a mansion owned by Ron Lauder, the billionaire CEO of the cosmetics company Estée Lauder Cos. Inc. They are digging a tunnel 80 feet below the sand, which will be used to string a transmission cable linking New York’s first offshore wind farm to the state’s power grid.

The project has roiled this well-heeled hamlet, attracting opposition from the likes of Lauder and the area’s other rich beachgoers. But unlike on Cape Cod, where wealthy residents helped sink America’s first proposed offshore wind farm five years ago, this 12-turbine project is moving ahead with construction. Its Danish developer expects it will begin generating electricity late next year, providing enough power for 70,000 Long Island households.

Fielder, a 69-year-old Massachusetts transplant to the Hamptons, is thrilled by the sight. He jabs the air with his cigar as he talks, describing the arrival of the liftboat several weeks ago and how its deck has been outfitted with a pair of cranes. And he is quick to dismiss the opposition. When work is done in several months, there will be no visible signs of the transmission line, which will be buried beneath the road. Most year-round residents, he reckons, are supportive of the project.

“It has to happen somewhere. It has to happen in someone’s backyard,” says Fielder, who lives in the nearby village of East Hampton. “It’s for my kids more. The climate change up to now is nothing compared to what it’s going to be.”

The beach construction here in the Hamptons represents a turning point for offshore wind in America. The industry struggled for years to gain a toehold in the United States due to soaring installation costs and not-in-my-backyard opposition. Now it is on the precipice of becoming a reality.

Developers hold leases for nine projects in the shallow waters between Martha’s Vineyard and Long Island. Two are already under construction. Cable installation recently began for Vineyard Wind 1, a 62-turbine project serving Massachusetts. The 800-megawatt development is expected to begin generating electricity in 2024.

Read the full article at E&E News

Wind turbines will affect base of ocean food chain, study predicts

December 7, 2022 — Atmospheric wakes trailing behind offshore wind turbines will change oceanographic and marine ecosystem conditions in the North Sea as more and larger turbines are built there to meet Europe’s energy needs, according to a recent study published in the journal Nature.

The paper by researchers Ute Daewel, Naveed Akhtar, Nils Christiansen and Corinna Schrum of the Institute for Coastal Systems in Germany used numerical modeling to show how wind wakes may change local conditions.

Those systems could be moved by plus or minus 10 percent, not just within turbine arrays but over a wider region, the team wrote. That includes “primary production:” the generation of nutrients at the base of the marine food chain.

The Nov. 24 publication of their paper, “Offshore wind farms are projected to impact primary production and bottom water deoxygenation in the North Sea,” is the latest from scientists investigating how larger-scale offshore wind projects may alter ocean conditions and ecosystems.

As in Europe, U.S. researchers too are looking at how wind wake and ocean currents flowing for miles behind turbines will change the seasonal stratification of cooler water close to the bottom, peaking in summer and turning over in fall and spring.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

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

CLIMATE CHANGE WILL CAUSE PACIFIC’S LOW-OXYGEN ZONE TO EXPAND EVEN MORE BY 2100

November 30, 2022 — For thousands of kilometers along the western coasts of the Americas, low-oxygen waters known as oxygen minimum zones stretch out into the Pacific. In part due to climate change, this oxygen-starved region is likely to get wider and deeper, expanding by millions of cubic kilometers by the end of the century, models in a new study predict. Larger oxygen minimum zones threaten marine ecosystems and species, along with the industries that depend on them.

Oxygen minimum zones are located 200 to 2000 meters (656 to 6560 feet) beneath the surface, in the “shadow regions” of the tropical ocean, and are driven by factors such as water temperature, nutrient supply and ocean circulation patterns. Predicting how they will respond to climate change has proven difficult and the Pacific oxygen minimum zone, which is the largest in the world, is no exception. Part of the difficulty in predicting changes arises from disagreements on how to define “low” oxygen levels, which the new study explores.

Read the full article at AGU

NOAA scientists propose more protection for right whales in offshore wind area

November 30, 2022 — The following is an excerpt from an article published by the New Bedford Light:

As America’s offshore wind industry gets ready to launch new clean energy projects off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, conservationists and federal scientists have communicated worries over how the installations could harm the endangered North Atlantic right whale, now numbering an estimated 340.

In light of these potential threats, a federal scientist proposed a “conservation buffer” zone — or area of no wind turbines — of about 10 nautical miles adjacent to the Nantucket shoals and seemingly overlapping with offshore wind development planned in southern New England.

Sean Hayes, chief of the protected species branch at NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center (NEFSC) and the letter’s signatory, proposed the buffer zone in a letter this spring to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) — the lead regulator for offshore wind development. According to maps of the wind lease areas, the proposed 20-kilometer buffer beginning at an area called the “30-meter isobath” in the shoals appears to overlap with an eastern portion of the Massachusetts-Rhode Island wind energy area.

Scientists in a 2022 New England Aquarium-led study found an increasing trend of right whales in the waters off of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket during all seasons (instead of just in the winter and spring) and cited climate change as a possible driver with a warming ocean shifting the whales’ feeding and migration patterns.

NOAA Fisheries submitted a public comment to BOEM for the Mayflower Wind project several months before Hayes’ letter (sent in May of this year) that included a similar proposal. While not explicitly mentioning a conservation buffer zone, it recommended BOEM in its environmental impact statement (EIS) include a project alternative of no turbines in a portion of the lease.

“We recommend BOEM evaluate in the EIS an alternative that limits the portion of the lease where [wind turbine generators] can be installed, which would result in no [wind turbine generators] in the northern portion of the lease area,” said the comment letter. “This alternative would reduce project overlap with some of the highest documented densities of North Atlantic right whale aggregations in the lease area…”

The 800-megawatt Mayflower Wind project is currently under review by BOEM. Asked if the company is planning to establish turbine-free areas in the lease as a potential mitigating measure for the right whales, Daniel Hubbard, director of external affairs and general counsel for Mayflower Wind, said by email that they are reviewing information and that “as the permitting process progresses, as with all material presented, we will take it into consideration.”

Research has found turbines will likely affect tidal currents and the water column in which zooplankton (right whales’ food) are found. Whales require dense collections of zooplankton, and any disruptions to that could have “significant energetic and population consequences,” Hayes wrote, particularly for their winter feeding area.

“It’s like the perfect storm of what could go wrong,” said Erica Fuller, a senior attorney at the Conservation Law Foundation (CLF).

Fuller said the area in and around the New England waters where wind development is set to take place was poorly surveyed for right whales before the federal government identified it for multiple energy leases. In recent years, aerial surveys have shown it’s become a year-round foraging habitat for the whales.

Through federal authorizations, the government limits how many individuals of a given species can be incidentally (not intentionally) harassed, disturbed or injured by an activity. Commercial fishing is an existing industry that has operated with such authorizations, which are now being reviewed and given to wind developers.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Light

NORTH CAROLINA: Will North Carolina get offshore wind farms? Right now it’s up to one state commission

November 21, 2022 — There’s a swath of ocean just over the horizon off Oak Island, in the southeast corner of North Carolina, that one day could be home to hundreds of towering offshore wind turbines. The project, federal regulators say, could produce as much power as Duke Energy’s nearby Brunswick Nuclear plant.

Duke Energy won the rights to build a wind farm in one of two leases off the coast of Brunswick County and Myrtle Beach, called the Carolina Long Bay area. The company said that lease is not part of the sale it announced recently of its renewable energy business.

This is all part of a plan, passed last year by the General Assembly, to reduce carbon emissions from power companies by 70% by 2030 and make power generation carbon neutral by 2050.

But how that works, and what role offshore wind plays in North Carolina’s clean energy mix, is now in the hands of the state Utilities Commission. The commission, which oversees North Carolina power companies, has been taking comments and proposals for months.

“We know the absolute earliest we’ve seen anyone projecting offshore wind is in the 2030 timeframe,” said Katherine Kollins, a wind industry advocate who leads the Southeast Wind Coalition. “That still is a lot of lead time, more than I would like.”

Read the full article at Spectrum News

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