Saving Seafood

Feds to begin review of wind farm off Long Beach

June 25, 2021 — A $3 billion proposal to build what would be New York state’s largest offshore wind farm is taking shape, with plans to run an underground cable through Long Beach to a substation near the E.F. Barrett Power Station in Island Park. A precise location for the cable has not yet been determined.

The federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management will soon begin an environmental review of the construction and operation of what would be called Empire Wind, off Long Island’s South Shore. The review is expected to take two years, and the project would need state approval as well. Work on Empire Wind would begin no sooner than 2023. Long Beach would not be involved in the approval process, but would help determine the location of the underground cable.

The wind turbines would be about 15 miles offshore.

The Long Island Commercial Fishing Association is strongly opposed to the project, claiming that fish, and fishermen, will be adversely affected.

Equinor, a company based in Norway, has been awarded contracts by New York state, the first in 2019, to supply 816 megawatts of power to the state grid, connecting in Brooklyn. A second contract, for 1,260 megawatts, was awarded in January, for Long Island’s South Shore.

Read the full story at the LI Herald

NEW YORK: Energy giant to hold forum with fishermen over cross-Sound cable route

May 5, 2021 — A European energy giant on Wednesday will hold a forum for concerned North Shore fishermen to outline the plan for a power cable route that will extend across the Long Island Sound.

The meeting, which is closed to the media, will address concerns by some fishermen that the route could complicate trap and trawl fishing in the Sound and elsewhere, Newsday has confirmed.

The route, as proposed by Equinor, the Norwegian energy giant, will extend more than 150 miles from windmills in the waters off Massachusetts to an electrical station in Astoria, Queens, traversing the entire Long Island Sound. It will cross over or under a dozen other power or communication cables that have operated in the waters for decades with few problems, Equinor said. Some longtime fishermen acknowledged this, saying the buried cable is unlikely to pose problems. The cables will be buried 4 to 6 feet deep for the entire route, Equinor has said.

Read the full story at Newsday

NY award will more than double the number of wind turbines planned for South Shore

January 20, 2021 — New York State’s decision last week to award two “massive” offshore wind power contracts to Norwegian energy giant Equinor will more than double the size of a planned wind farm off the coast of Long Island. It also promises “substantial” upgrades to a section of the electric grid at Oceanside.

The plan, announced by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo last week as part of an expansive post-COVID-19 green economy, would bring the number the number of turbines expected to be spinning off the South Shore by 2027 to around 170, encompassing some 80,000 acres from Jones Beach to Islip, the company said. New York has a stated goal of some 9,000 megawatts of wind power by 2035, to displace carbon-belching conventional plants.

The state awarded the projects to Norwegian energy giant Equinor, which in 2019 was awarded a separate contract for 816 megawatts in a project called Empire Wind 1, some 15 miles off Jones Beach. That project will be constructed by 2024 directly adjacent to the newly awarded Empire Wind 2 and will be “built as one project, in sequence,” said Siri Espedal Kindem, president of Equinor’s U.S. Wind division. Empire Wind 2 is expected to be comprised of some 90 turbines.

She said the company is interested in bidding for new lease areas off the coast of Long Island, a process currently stalled under the Trump Administration.

Read the full story at Newsday

European developers build out dominance in US offshore wind race

October 8, 2020 — Utilities and oil majors from Europe are slicing up the Eastern Seaboard when it comes to the burgeoning U.S. offshore wind industry, with fewer domestic-owned developers so far putting money into a sector that is expected to balloon over the coming decade.

BP PLC became the latest company to enter the fray in September, when it bought into two offshore wind developments owned by Norway’s Equinor ASA, the Beacon Wind and Empire Wind projects, which between them have development potential of 4,400 MW, including an 816-MW state contract already awarded for Empire Wind. The joint venture between the two oil and gas firms follows a host of deals and leasing rounds that have seen the major players of Europe’s own offshore boom take the lead in the sector’s next big market.

Denmark’s Ørsted A/S, Spain’s Iberdrola SA and the BP-Equinor joint venture now own just over 11,600 MW of planned projects along the coast, while Dominion Energy Inc. and Eversource Energy — the next two top owners — are sitting on a combined 4,500 MW of projects, according to an S&P Global Market Intelligence analysis.

Read the full story at S&P Global

BP Enters Offshore Wind Market With $1.1 Billion Equinor Deal. Why The Stock Is Falling.

September 11, 2020 — BP stock fell on Thursday, as the oil major entered the offshore wind market in a $1.1 billion deal with Norwegian energy giant Equinor.

The FTSE 100-listed company has agreed to buy 50% stakes in two of Equinor’s wind farm developments on the U.S. East Coast—the Empire Wind project in New York and the Beacon Wind farm in Massachusetts.

The two companies have also formed a strategic partnership to pursue further opportunities for offshore wind in the U.S.

The back story. In February—shortly after Bernard Looney became its chief executive—BP set out an action plan to become net zero on carbon by 2050. The company ramped up its strategy last month, saying it won’t explore in any new countries and announcing a tenfold increase in low-carbon investment to $5 billion a year by 2030.

Read the full story at MarketWatch

Equinor names New England offshore Beacon Wind

June 2, 2020 — Norwegian energy company Equinor has given the name Beacon Wind to a planned offshore wind farm off the US New England coast.

Beacon Wind will be located about 32km south of Massachusetts and 112km east of New York.

Wildlife surveys for the project kicked off last year and this summer more surveys will be undertaken to characterise conditions of the lease area, the company said.

These include looking at the geologic conditions, benthic habitat and checking for the presence of obstructions and sensitive resources.

Equinor Wind said its Boston-based team is actively engaged with commercial fishermen and their representatives to ensure that the development of Beacon Wind coexists successfully with traditional northeast maritime industries.

“Insights and feedback from the fishing industry are critical to the collaborative development of Beacon Wind,” the company said.

Read the full story at ReNews

Coast Guard backs wind industry on turbine layout

June 1, 2020 — The offshore wind power industry cleared one of its last remaining bureaucratic hurdles Wednesday with the release of a long-awaited report from the Coast Guard that essentially agrees with an industry proposal on turbine layout.

The Coast Guard’s Massachusetts and Rhode Island Port Access Route Study has concluded that turbines should be spaced 1.2 miles apart and oriented in the same direction across seven offshore wind lease areas totaling around 1,400 square miles south of Nantucket.

Concerned with vessel safety and the ability to maneuver while fishing, some fishermen and industry groups sought larger lanes, as wide as 4 miles, to transit to fishing grounds, but the five wind power companies holding the leases said that would force them to crowd turbines outside the travel lanes, making it less safe to navigate and fish.

The offshore wind leaseholders — Equinor, Mayflower Wind, Orsted/Eversource and Vineyard Wind — had been concerned that some of the layouts proposed by other stakeholders could reduce the number of turbines and power generation. The increasing efficiency and power capacity of newer turbines have alleviated some of that concern.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times

JOE GILBERT: Wind turbine spacing plan inadequate for fishing safety

November 26, 2019 — From the perspective of Connecticut’s commercial fishermen who provide over $53 million to our state’s economy, nearly 1,000 jobs and food on the table of countless consumers, I wanted to respond to the Nov. 19 Day article, “New England Wind Turbine Plan Proposed to Allay Concerns.”

The four developers advancing offshore wind farms off Connecticut’s coast and competing for Connecticut’s energy contracts – Equinor, Mayflower Wind, Orsted/Eversource and Vineyard Wind – released their proposal to the U.S. Coast Guard for how to consistently position turbines across the region in a way that they believe will satisfy safety concerns raised by commercial fishermen and other mariners.

“This uniform layout is consistent with the requests of the region’s fisheries industry and other maritime users,” they said in a press release. It “will allow mariners to safely transit from one end of the New England Wind Energy Area (WEA) to the other without unexpected obstacles.”

It is unclear to me and other fishermen what industry requests these developers are responding to. This proposal certainly does not reflect the position of the Connecticut mobile gear fishermen, i.e., trawlers and scallopers. In fact, the report that this proposal is based on does not even identify Connecticut’s port in Stonington as having a scallop fishery at all. Nor does it mention or account for the needs of the New London commercial fishing fleet. With such an omission, how can the report address the needs of Connecticut’s fishermen? By the report’s own admission, the data used for this analysis may only account for as little as 40% of the total fishing vessels that may transit or fish in the WEA.

Read the full story at The Day

New England fishing groups object to latest offshore wind layout proposal

November 19, 2019 — Groups representing New England fisheries are objecting to a recently released proposal regarding the future spacing of offshore wind turbines.

Five companies that hold leases for offshore wind projects in New England – Equinor, Mayflower Wind, Ørsted/Eversource, and Vineyard Wind – released a joint statement calling for a uniform layout of the wind turbines. The companies are calling for a 1 nautical mile spacing, arranged in east-west rows and north-south columns.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

US fisheries rebuff offshore wind’s project layout rethink

November 19, 2019 — The five developers advancing offshore wind farms off the northeast US – Equinor, Mayflower Wind, Orsted/Eversource and Vineyard Wind – have put forward a proposal to the country’s US Coast Guard (USCG) to use a uniform turbine layout for the projects, in a bid to defuse ongoing objections from the regional fishery industries.

The New England Offshore Wind Leaseholders (NEOWL), advancing more than 7GW between them, said the layout would have rows of turbines spaced one nautical mile apart, and align to the USCG’s requirement for “robust navigational safety and search and rescue capability by providing hundreds of transit corridors to accommodate the region’s vessel traffic”.

“This uniform layout is consistent with the requests of the region’s fisheries industry and other maritime users,” said the NEOWL in a joint statement. The proposed layout specifies that turbines will be spaced one nautical mile apart, arranged in east-west rows and north-south columns, with the rows and columns continuous across all New England lease areas.

Read the full story at ReCharge News