Massachusetts Archives - Page 39 of 360

MASSACHUSETTS: An ocean of ambition

April 10, 2024 — Last November, a group of New Bedford seafood companies crowded into a Zoom conference room hosted by Delaware’s bankruptcy court.

One by one, a trustee listed the assets up for sale: eight commercial fishing vessels and 48 federal fishing permits. It was a fire-sale liquidation for bankrupt Blue Harvest Fisheries — one of New England’s largest seafood companies — and the largest bundle of groundfish permits in recent history to come available on the market.

Bids, the trustee announced, would start at $10 million.

Cassie Canastra was first to act: “$11 million,” she said, without skipping a beat.

There was a brief pause, as a team representing O’Hara Corporation, part owner of New Bedford-based scallop giant Eastern Fisheries, huddled to discuss their options. They raised the bid to $11.25 million.

“$12 million,” Canastra responded, showing no sign of relenting.

For Blue Harvest, the bankruptcy auction marked the final chapter in its aggressive, eight-year expansion. For the New Bedford waterfront, it marked a changing of the guards — ushering in a new captain at the helm of the city’s fabled but struggling groundfish industry.

Read the full article at the New Bedford Light

MASSACHUSETTS: Mixed Results as Commercial Bay Scallop Season Ends

April 6, 2024 — After a banner year for Vineyard commercial scallopers in the 2022-23 season, this winter’s bay scallop season was something of a cool-down for the notoriously fickle fishery.

Island fishermen harvested around 2,500 fewer bushels this year, though local scallopers and fishmongers say it wasn’t all bad news for the fishery, as a lower harvest on- and off-Island prevented the precipitous drop in scallop prices that occurred last year.

“It was good this year,” said Matteus Scheffer, who drags from the Anita Penny out of Cape Pogue. “This year, we were all getting our [daily bushel] limits pretty well, for the most part.”

Edgartown shellfish constable Rob Morrison described the harvest as “not bad by modern standards.”

“Scallops are one of those things where their abundance does seem to be cyclical,” he added.

Read the full article at the Vineyard Gazette

Two Mass-based offshore wind farms clear biggest federal hurdle

April 4, 2024 –Two wind farms bidding for a contract in Massachusetts have cleared a major federal hurdle by receiving a favorable Record of Decision, a combined approval by agencies responsible for ocean energy, marine fisheries, and waterways engineering.

The projects are New England Wind 1 and 2, formerly called Park City Wind and Commonwealth Wind. Both are owned by Avangrid and are covered by a single decision.

Although the projects need additional federal permits, the decision announced Tuesday is considered the primary approval from the Biden administration, said Ken Kimmell, Avangrid’s chief development officer for offshore wind.

Read the full article at CAI

MASSACHUSETTS: New Bedford State Pier redevelopment proposals to be subject of May public meeting

April 2, 2024 — A public meeting to review proposals for the State Pier’s redevelopment is being planned for May.

MassDevelopment, the state’s development finance agency and land bank, manages the eight-acre pier property, which is owned by the state.

MassDevelopment President and CEO Dan Rivera stated in a communication to New Bedford legislators, “We are planning a public meeting in New Bedford at which all respondents will have an equal opportunity to make a public presentation explaining their respective proposals.”

He said they were trying to finalize a date in May.

Read the full article at the Standard-Times

MASSACHUSETTS: The complicated truths about offshore wind and right whales

April 1, 2024 — By the time researchers found the dead whale on a Martha’s Vineyard beach, her jet-black skin was pockmarked by hungry seagulls, her baleen had been dislodged from her mouth, and thin rope was wrapped tightly—as it had been for 17 months—around the most narrow part of her tail.

Researchers quickly learned this was a 12-ton, 3-year-old female known as 5120, and that she was a North Atlantic right whale, a species with just about 360 members left.

A few weeks later, NOAA Fisheries announced that the entangling rope came from lobster fishing gear set in Maine state waters. The pain and discomfort of the entanglement likely affected 5120’s ability to swim and eat until finally, experts say, exhaustion or starvation probably killed her. A final cause of death is still pending.

The death of 5120 was devastating to right whale advocates, who know that losing a female doesn’t just mean losing one whale, but dozens of others that could have come from her future calves. For them, a death is often followed by a period of grief, and a renewed commitment to their work. And that might have been the end of 5120’s story.

But then came the online comments. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, across social media blamed offshore wind farms—the noise, electricity generated, and the mere presence of turbines. Along the way, the truth about 5120 became a non-concern.

In many cases, the rumors about offshore wind hurting and killing right whales are quite possibly spread from a place of concern, mistrust, or fear by well-meaning people who want to know our oceans are safe for marine mammals. But few people want that more than right whale scientists, who have dedicated their careers to saving a species that appears to be just a few decades from extinction. For many of them, talking about offshore wind has its own challenges, both because of the unknowns that come with a nascent industry and the knee-jerk reactions from people on all sides of the issue. So they say that yes, they’re uneasy about the potential threats of wind farms. But they agonize over the prospect of climate change destroying right whales’ shot at survival via their food web and ecosystem.

Read the full article at CAI

Offshore energy projects in New England will need years to power up

March 30, 2024 — Following more than a year of tumult in the industry that called into question the future of offshore wind in New England, Massachusetts and its southern neighbors on Wednesday got the menu of options for the next phase of clean energy development.

Massachusetts is seeking as much as 3,600 megawatts of offshore wind capacity in its fourth procurement round, its biggest procurement ever. And through a tri-state partnership with Rhode Island and Connecticut, Massachusetts and its neighbors are planning to coordinate their selections for a combined 6,000 MW of offshore wind energy capacity, leading to the possibility of multi-state projects although the newly submitted bids in the aggregate fall short of reaching that 6,000 MW threshold.

The latest round of bids comes after Massachusetts and other states in the Northeast went backwards on offshore wind over the last year and a half. Both projects selected in Massachusetts’ last procurement became much more expensive as inflation took off and the war in Ukraine snarled supply chains, and the developers behind them paid multi-million dollar fines to back out of the contracts they had agreed to. Both projects were re-bid in some form Wednesday, are are expected to come with a higher price to ratepayers.

By Wednesday’s noon deadline, Massachusetts received proposals from three developers who also submitted their proposals for the multi-state solicitation: Vineyard Offshore, Avangrid Renewables and SouthCoast Wind. At their maximum, the projects that were bid to Massachusetts on Wednesday would represent a cumulative 4,270 MW of capacity. The developer Orsted also bid a 1,184 MW project to Rhode Island and Connecticut, making approximately 5,454 MW available for the multi-state effort.

Read the full article at New England Public Media

MASSACHUSETTS: Massachusetts and its neighbors receive offshore wind project proposals

Massachusetts is seeking as much as 3,600 megawatts of offshore wind capacity in its fourth procurement round, its biggest procurement ever. And through a tri-state partnership with Rhode Island and Connecticut, Massachusetts and its neighbors are planning to coordinate their selections for a combined 6,000 megawatts of offshore wind energy capacity, leading to the possibility of multi-state projects although the newly submitted bids in the aggregate fall short of reaching that 6,000 megawatt threshold.

By Wednesday’s noon deadline, Massachusetts received proposals from three developers who also submitted their proposals for the multi-state solicitation: Vineyard Offshore, Avangrid Renewables and SouthCoast Wind. At their maximum, the projects that were bid to Massachusetts on Wednesday would represent a cumulative 4,270 megawatts of capacity. The developer Orsted also bid a 1,184 megawatt project to Rhode Island and Connecticut, making approximately 5,454 megawatts available for the multi-state effort.

Read the full article at wbur

MASSACHUSETTS: Fast ferries to Cape and Islands could be in jeopardy if speed limits cut to protect right whales

March 26, 2024 — The familiar “beep” of a ferry boat off the coast of Hyannis often signals a summer vacation, but for most of the year – it’s actually a lifeline for industry on the island.

“I work on the island and live over here,” on the mainland, Amos Campbell told WBZ-TV as he waited for a ferry Monday to go to work on Nantucket. He takes the fast passenger ferry twice a week.

That commute, and those of others who rely on ferry service in the off-season, is under threat due to proposed environmental regulation.

Read the full article at CBS News

MASSACHUSETTES: Massachusetts fishermen say feds are hypocritical in Gulf of Maine wind energy designation

March 25, 2024 — A move to designate two million acres in the Gulf of Maine as a hub for wind energy is snagging a sharp hook from Massachusetts fishermen who say the development overlooks risks to the North Atlantic right whale.

A handful of Bay State fishermen advocacy groups are teaming with counterparts from across New England in criticizing the Biden administration’s plans to industrialize the area off the coasts of Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine.

The federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management finalized the designation earlier this month, an action it says looks to support President Biden’s clean energy goals.

The area, which ranges from 23 to 92 miles off the coasts of the three states, has the potential to support generation of 32 gigawatts of clean energy, the bureau said. That amount of energy surpasses “current state goals for offshore wind energy in the Gulf of Maine: 10 GW for Massachusetts and 3 GW for Maine,” BOEM said.

Specifically, industrialization could lead to the deployment of 30 gigawatts of offshore wind energy capacity by 2030 and 15 gigawatts of floating offshore wind energy capacity by 2035, according to the feds.

Local, state and federal officials over the years have mandated fishermen to follow a growing number of protocols to preserve the endangered right whales — in some cases, barring them from taking to certain waters.

Read the full article at the Boston Herald

Wind compensation announced, fishermen remain wary

March 25, 2024 — Mass. vessel owners and fishing permit holders can now enroll in a compensation program to cover losses caused by the construction and operations of wind farms. Fishermen who are sharing the waters with Vineyard Wind may be eligible for funds through the Fisheries Compensatory Mitigation Program. The program is through the farm’s developers and offers $19.1 million for Mass. Fishermen and a combined $7.5 million for fishermen from other states who have routinely fished the same area in recent years.

To be eligible, fishermen must show they fished within the project’s lease area for at least three years between 2016 and 2022. The Cape Cod Times shared that though the funds are meant to bring relief to those working on the water already limited by regulations and allowable catch volumes, fishermen have raised many questions and criticism that there isn’t enough funding, the eligibility criteria are too limiting, and the program doesn’t take into account the effects fishermen who work outside of the lease area may experience.

The Vineyard Wind project is under construction 15 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard and is planned for a nearly 261-square-mile lease area. Activist groups and fishermen have opposed offshore wind development and have insisted that the significant number of whale deaths on the East Coast can be correlated to survey and construction work on energy projects, such as Vineyard Wind.

The New England Fishermen’s Stewardship Association (NEFSA) and Responsible Offshore Development Alliance (RODA) also have serious questions about how offshore wind activity is connected to the spikes in whale mortality throughout the Atlantic.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman