Saving Seafood

NEW YORK: Trying to explain the whys of Long Island wind farms

June 5, 2023 — A group of experts attempted to explain to a large crowd at Long Beach’s City Hall last Wednesday the need for a plan by New York State to construct a wind farm off Long Island’s South Shore.

The plan has generated considerable controversy in Long Beach and Oceanside, over health issues generated by cables stretching from the wind turbines to the E.F. Barrett Power Plant in Island Park.

But the experts were not always successful.

The presentation was organized by the Citizens Campaign for the Environment (CCE) led by its executive director, Adrienne Esposito.

Topics included the basics of the Offshore Wind project, the dangers of electromagnetic fields (EMFs), how the project will affect marine life and the benefit for local labor and jobs.

Read the full article at LIHerald.com

NEW YORK: Recuiting underway on Long Island as work on offshore wind farm begins

April 26, 2023 –The nation’s first large offshore wind farms are being built off of New York.

It’s a fast-growing industry looking to hire thousands of people.

CBS2’s Carolyn Gusoff went to a forum on Long Island that is matching local companies and job seekers with opportunities.

New York is leading the nation in offshore wind projects planned, and here come the jobs.

The first of 10,000 were previewed Tuesday at a Brentwood forum for local companies and a future workforce.

Read the full article at CBS

Scallops dying off in Long Island are ‘a cautionary tale’ for New England

January 24, 2023 — Once one of the largest fisheries on the East Coast, Peconic Bay scallops have faced near complete die-offs on Long Island since 2019.

A study by Stony Brook University shows this could be a cautionary tale for New England.

Christopher Gobler, a co-author and endowed chair of coastal ecology and conservation in the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, used satellite thermal imaging and recorded scallop heartbeats to measure how less oxygen and warming waters put stress on shellfish populations.

Data shows over the past two decades, the Peconic Bay estuary — and the entire Northeast — are warming at rates during summer that far exceed global average; Gobler said, “about threefold higher.”

Read the full article at wbur

Wind Farm Update From Orsted on a Blustery Beach

December 10, 2022 — Is that Poseidon’s triton reaching from the littoral shallows, or are you just trying to build a 132-megawatt wind farm?

The South Fork Wind project site at the end of Beach Lane in Wainscott certainly gives pause, if not a shudder of megalophobia. Three intimidatingly large steel pilings jut into the sky just off the beach, while nearby, drills continue with the jarringly loud work of drilling a horizontal tunnel from a cable tie-in near the Long Island Rail Road line to the north to the workers’ barge just offshore, temporarily anchored by the pilings.

Troy Patton, head of program execution, Americas, for Orsted, which is building the wind project via a 50-50 partnership with Eversource, was on the scene last week to give an update on the project, which will see the installation, 35 miles to the east off Montauk, of a dozen 11-megawatt wind turbines. The turbines will tie in by an undersea cable, to the land-ho connection point in Wainscott.

It’s a windy Thursday afternoon, but not as windy as the day before. “We like the wind,” Mr. Patton said as he updated reporters on what has happened to date.

Read the full article at the East Hampton Star

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

NEW YORK: Scallops keep dying in Long Island’s Peconic Bay, harming the local fishing community

November 15, 2022 — Usually during November, veteran scalloper Chris Tehan would be on the Peconics — his boat dredging for the prized mollusk living in the pair of bays squeezed between Long Island’s North Fork and South Fork.

But in 2022, Tehan is hardly finding any because the Peconic scallop population is crashing. Scientists blame the climate crisis, but they’re also hopeful the marine animal could be saved before the fishing community goes bust.

This year represents the fourth in a row of record die-offs for Peconic Bay scallops. Their population density has dropped more than 90% since 2018, according to new survey data from the Cornell Cooperative Extension of Suffolk County that is yet to be published.

“We monitor 21 different sites. And in total, we found only 19 adult scallops in those 21 surveys,” said Harrison Tobi, an aquaculture specialist who helped lead the study. Recent counts have been so low that the federal government issued a disaster declaration in 2021 promising federal relief to the fishery.

Tobi said climate change-induced warmer waters are causing better conditions for a parasite that harms the scallops and impedes their reproduction. He added that Peconic scallops are essential to the bay’s ecosystem, given their position in the food web and their ability to filter algae and bacteria from the water.

Read the full article at the Gothamist

Enjoy the View While It Lasts. Jersey Shore with 100s of Wind Turbines Revealed

June 20, 2022 — They look like small white crosses along the ocean horizon, about an eighth of an inch in size to ocean gazers along New Jersey’s beaches and shore communities.

But those little marks are actually giant, spinning wind turbines more than 900 feet tall, and they will span full panoramic views in places like Little Egg Harbor near southern Long Beach Island and Stone Harbor just north of Cape May, according to new illustrations released as part of the state’s first planned offshore wind farm.

The images were released for the first time publicly by the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management on June 17. BOEM published hundreds of pages of analysis, data, graphics and illustrations that reveal much of the details that have not been publicly known about New Jersey’s forthcoming offshore wind farms.

Read the full story at NBC Philadelphia

 

NEW YORK: Long Island’s Offshore Wind Farm Plans Take Root

March 2, 2022 — After years of planning and debate, offshore wind farm developers recently took several big steps forward in a half dozen projects in various stages of development off the coast of Long Island.

A record-setting sale of offshore wind development rights last week saw combined bids for six areas off the coasts of New York and New Jersey stretching to $4.73 billion. The auction came less than two weeks after officials held a groundbreaking — or a seafloor breaking, as it were — ceremony in Wainscott on Feb. 11 to mark construction starting on the 130-megawatt South Fork Wind, the first offshore wind project in New York State.

LOCAL OPPOSITION

The South Fork Wind farm’s developers, Ørsted & Eversource, who plan to build 12 turbines about 30 miles off Montauk’s coast — enough to power 70,000 homes annually — have faced legal challenges from some Wainscott residents opposed to the cable coming ashore in their community.

Citizens for the Preservation of Wainscott filed a motion in the Appellate Division of New York State Supreme Court to block the construction until the court has an opportunity to rule on the group’s appeal of the state Public Service Commission’s decision allowing the cable to run through the community. The appeals court judges rejected that motion last month, but the suit is pending.

“We continue to support the move to renewable energy and celebrate the progress toward that goal,” the group said in a statement following the groundbreaking. “But we continue to have serious reservations regarding an infrastructure project that runs its cable through residential neighborhoods, and next to a PFAS superfund site, particularly when better alternative sites were available. Our focus will continue to be on protecting our community.”

The group isn’t the only one opposed. Bonnie Brady, executive director of the Montauk-based Long Island Commercial Fishing Association, protested the groundbreaking ceremony while playing an audio recording of what she says the construction noise will sound like from on land. As officials left, she reminded them that the turbines will be built in North Atlantic Right Whale territory.

Read the full story at the Long Island Press

The US Is Turning an Area Half the Size of Rhode Island Into a Wind Farm

February 25, 2022 —  The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) is entering the second day of a long awaited sale of nearly a half-million acres of land for offshore wind infrastructure.

488,201 acres of land off the coast of Long Island and New Jersey—a region known as the New York Bight—went up for sale at 9 a.m. on Wednesday. Over the course of the day, six regions of land were offered to an approved list of 25 bidders that include oil and gas giants like Equinor and BP, and a number of smaller, local renewable energy companies like Atlantic Shores Offshore Wind and Bight Wind Holdings.

14 of these approved bidders showed up, the BOEM told Motherboard. Bids are ongoing, updated live on the BOEM website, and, across the six regions, have ranged from $4.3-million in the first round to $410-million in the 21st round. Bidding will continue on Thursday at 9 a.m.

It’s the largest area ever offered in a single auction, estimated to result in 5.6 to 7 gigawatts of renewable energy, enough to power 2-million homes, per a press release the Department of the Interior issued with the announcement of the auction in January. Deb Haaland, secretary of the interior, called the move a “once-in-a-generation opportunity to fight climate change and create good-paying union jobs” in the announcement.

“We are at an inflection point for domestic offshore wind energy development,” Haaland said in the release. “We must seize this moment – and we must do it together.”

Read the full story at Vice

 

New York breaks ground on 1st offshore wind farm, would be largest in U.S.

February 14, 2022 — The construction of a dozen wind turbines 35 miles off Long Island’s eastern tip has begun, officials said Friday, marking the state’s first offshore wind project launch.

The South Fork Wind Farm is planned to sit south of Rhode Island and send power to East Hampton. It could also put New York into rare air: Gov. Hochul has said the state will boast the largest offshore wind farm in the Western Hemisphere after the project’s completion.

The farm is projected to power up to 70,000 homes. New York is also whipping up several larger offshore wind plants that the government estimated will collectively power more than 2 million homes and create thousands of jobs.

“If you ask what the energy future looks like, I say: The answer my friends is blowing in the wind,” Gov. Hochul said in a rhetorical nod to Bob Dylan at the Friday groundbreaking ceremony. “This is just the beginning.”

Read the full story at the New York Daily News