Saving Seafood

CT officials, workers decry Trump administration’s halt to nearly completed offshore wind project

August 26, 2025 — Wind turbine pieces stood hundreds of feet tall above dozens of trade workers and Connecticut officials Monday, as they spoke out against the Trump administration’s sudden pause of Revolution Wind, an offshore wind farm project. It was poised to soon provide electricity to at least 350,000 homes in Connecticut and Rhode Island.

“This is a project that our grid operator was counting on to turn on at the end of next year,” Katie Dykes, commissioner of the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, said from the State Pier in New London.

Read the full article at Maine Public

Fishing Group Renews Effort to Stop Empire Wind

June 13, 2025 — The Long Island Commercial Fishing Association is among the groups calling for a renewed halt to the construction of the Empire Wind 1 offshore wind farm, which was the subject of a stop-work order in April that was lifted just a month later.

The organizations, which include Protect Our Coast-New Jersey and the Nantucket-based ACK for Whales, have called on Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to issue a stop-work order on the 54-turbine, 810-megawatt project, which is to span 80,000 acres in the New York Bight and send renewable electricity to New York City. Mr. Burgum had done just that on April 16, reportedly at the urging of Representatives Chris Smith and Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey and with the support of Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman.

A month later, the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management informed Equinor, the Norwegian company that is constructing the wind farm, that the stop-work order had been lifted, allowing construction to resume. Gov. Kathy Hochul took credit for the reversal, saying that she had “spent weeks pushing the federal government to rescind the stop-work order” so that construction on “this important source of renewable power” could proceed.

The groups seeking to halt the project cited the June 2 death of a subcontractor aboard a platform supply vessel.

“Unlike [the federal Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement’s] public reporting for oil and gas accidents, there is currently no centralized public reporting website for offshore wind fatalities or injuries,” the groups said in a statement. “The public, press, and fishing community were never informed of this fatality, echoing the lack of transparency seen after the Vineyard Wind LM107P blade implosion on July 13, 2024, when 55 tons of material were deposited into the ocean and washed onto Nantucket’s beaches, only disclosed 48 hours later.”

Read the full article at The East Hampton Star

Local, regional groups sue to halt Empire Wind project

June 13, 2025 — The U.S. government and several entities involved in the offshore Empire Wind 1 turbine project are being sued by environmental and fisheries groups seeking to halt construction, after an April stop work order on Empire Wind 1 was lifted by the U.S. Department of the Interior on May 19.

The plaintiffs in the suit, filed on June 3, hail from New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island, and include groups like Protect Our Coast NJ, Clean Ocean Action Inc., Massachusetts-based ACK for Whales, the Fisherman’s Dock Cooperative in Point Pleasant Beach and Miss Belmar, Inc.

The suit alleges that the rescindment of the stop work order is “incomplete and failed to safeguard the ecology of our seacoast and the livelihoods it supports,” the plaintiffs’ lead counsel, Bruce Afran, said in a press release obtained by The Ocean Star last week.

“President Trump halted the Empire Wind project due to the Biden Administration’s failure to adequately assess the environmental harm posed by these offshore wind turbines and the impact on our coastal fishing industry,” he said. “None of those critical issues have been resolved. We are asking the federal court to reinstate the stop work order because the project’s federal approvals were incomplete and failed to safeguard the ecology of our seacoast and the livelihoods it supports.”

A representative from Equinor, the Norwegian multinational company that owns the Empire Wind project, did not respond to a request for comment by press time Thursday.

The plaintiffs contend that the project, which would place 54 wind turbines approximately 20 miles east of Long Branch in a triangular area of water known as the New York-New Jersey Bight, would cause environmental disruptions “in one of the Atlantic’s most ecologically sensitive areas.”

Read the full article at Star News Group

 

Vineyard Wind 2 project in jeopardy with Connecticut withdrawal

December 23, 2024 — Connecticut state officials withdrew their planned offtake purchase of 400 megawatts from the future Vineyard Wind 2 expansion Dec. 20, threatening the 1,200 MW project that was based on plans for Massachusetts and Connecticut to split its energy production.

That news came hours after the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management announced its approval of the SouthCoast Wind project, on an adjoining lease to Vineyard Wind. 

Nantucket municipal officials said last week that turbine blade installations had resumed on the Vineyard Wind 1 lease Dec. 14, after five months of oversight by the federal Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, lengthy inspections and removal of some blades stemming from a catastrophic failure on one turbine July 13.

Read the full article at WorkBoat

US East Coast states select firms to run offshore wind development compensation fund for fishers

November 12, 2024 — A coalition of U.S. East Coast states have selected two firms to manage the Offshore Wind Fisheries Compensation Fund, a mitigation program built to compensate commercial and recreation for-hire fishers for revenue lost due to offshore wind developments.

The fund is a collaboration between the governments of 11 East Coast states – Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina – to provide financial compensation for economic loss caused by offshore wind projects along the Atlantic Coast. The states launched a competition earlier this year to select an administrator to run the new fund.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Richmond firm to oversee fishermen compensation related to offshore wind farms

November 6, 2024 — Richmond claims resolution firm BrownGreer PLC and London’s The Carbon Trust have been tapped to design and roll out a regional fisheries mitigation program on the East Coast.

The program is aimed at providing financial compensation to the commercial and recreational for-hire fishing industries related to the impacts of new offshore wind farms.

BrownGreer and The Carbon Trust will work with 11 East Coast states and their respective fishing industry communities on the program. The groups have established a design oversight committee and a for-hire committee to provide advice and guidance from respective parties on the program.

The involved states include Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina.

Read the full article at Richmond Inno

New England scores $389M from feds for energy

August 8, 2024 — The federal government is awarding $389 million to the New England states for regional electric infrastructure upgrades.

State officials announced the funding award earlier this week, saying the Power Up New England proposal features upgrades to interconnection points in southeast Massachusetts and southeast Connecticut to prepare the region for more offshore wind power.

Read the full article at Gloucester Daily Times

CONNECTICUT: Connecticut lobster industry forces fishermen into new career

July 3, 2024 — The New England lobster industry has played a vital role in generations of fishermen’s lives. Kids as young as six years old are following in their parent’s footsteps, hauling traps to be a part of something bigger than themselves.

Many lobstermen thought they would be on the water until the day they die, but in Connecticut, that isn’t the case.

Poor climate conditions have caused an almost total decline in the lobster population across the Long Island Sound over two decades, ending lobstering careers.

DJ King is a former lobsterman from Branford. His livelihood is still on the water, but not reliant on lobsters.

He says his love for trapping came early.

“I started with ten wooden traps, I was in a small boat, I would go out with my father, we pulled them by hand and caught a few every day,” King said.

What started as just a hobby quickly turned into a lifestyle.

“We did very well with lobsters back then, it was very lucrative, King said. “We would get around 600 or 800 a day usually. like 60-70 per 10 trawl, the guys couldn’t band them fast enough.”

But one day, after years of the good life, the traps came up empty.

“It never rebounded from that ‘99 year when we were catching hundreds daily,” King said. “Then all the sudden the pots were empty, or the lobsters were coming up dead. Even if they were alive, they wouldn’t make it back to the docks.”

Read the full article at FOX 61

CONNECTICUT: Ørsted pitches offshore wind project for State Pier in New London

March 28, 2024 — NEW LONDON — Ørsted, the Danish energy company staging offshore wind projects at State Pier, announced Wednesday it has pitched a proposal for its biggest U.S. wind farm to date with New London as its base.

Ørsted submitted a proposal for the 1,184-megawatt Starboard Wind to both Connecticut and Rhode Island as part of a three-state wind solicitation in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island that was due Wednesday.

The Danish wind giant was one of four companies to announce bids in the tri-state solicitation. Avangrid, SouthCoast Wind and Vineyard Offshore also made proposals as part of an auction in which the three states combined could enter power purchase agreements of up to 6,800 megawatts of offshore wind power.

Vineyard Offshore, partnered with Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, submitted a proposal to all three states for the 1,200-megawatt Vineyard Wind 2. That project would be located 29 miles south of Nantucket in Massachusetts, and would be staged in Salem, Mass., and have a grid connection in Montville by way of New London, the company said in a statement.

Avangrid, a member of the Iberdrola Group, has two proposals totaling 1,870 megawatts: the 791-megawatt New England Wind 1, formerly known as Bridgeport-based Park City Wind, and the 1,080-megawatt New England Wind 2. Avangrid is spearheading the development of the Vineyard Wind 1 project, which is currently under construction and will deliver power to the Massachusetts grid.

Read the full article at Yahoo! Finance

RI organizations file lawsuits against CT offshore wind projects

November 28, 2023 — Two Rhode Island heritage organizations have filed lawsuits over two offshore wind projects they say will spoil their “viewsheds.”

The Preservation Society of Newport and The Southeast Lighthouse Foundation say the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) ignored the National Historic Preservation Act and the National Environmental Policy Act.

Greg Werkheiser is a partner with the law firm Cultural Heritage Partners. He said they are not against clean energy, just the way it’s being done.

Read the full article at WSHU