Saving Seafood

NEW JERSEY: 6 protesters arrested as onshore testing work for New Jersey wind farm begins

September 13, 2023 — Police arrested six protesters Tuesday who tried to disrupt the start of land-based testing for New Jersey’s first offshore wind farm. But the work progressed anyway.

Police in Ocean City, which has become the hub of resistance to offshore wind projects in New Jersey and elsewhere along the U.S. East Coast, arrested demonstrators after the city said they failed to heed four warnings to get out of the roadway.

“There were three people lying in the street,” said Robin Shaffer, a spokesman for Protect Our Coast NJ, a residents’ group opposed to the local project and to offshore wind in general.

Read the full article at the Associated Press

NEW JERSEY: Wind Farm Protesters Vow to Continue Their Fight

September 12, 2023 — Wind farm developer Orsted recently hit the pause button on its proposed project that would include 98 towering turbines in the waters off the South Jersey coast.

But opponents say they will continue to fight until the project is stopped altogether.

On Sunday afternoon in drizzling rain, Congressman Jeff Van Drew, members of the local grassroots organization Protect Our Coast NJ and other anti-wind farm protesters rallied on 35th Street beach in Ocean City to reinforce their goal: No to wind farms, no to Orsted.

“You know it’s about the fishing industry. You know it’s about our beautiful animals that live in the sea. You know it’s about our environment,” Van Drew said to the crowd of a little more than 100 protesters. “You know it’s about our national security – literally, the Pentagon spoke against it and was squashed by the administration in Washington.”

Van Drew continued, “You know it’s about tripling our utility rates, maybe worse. Even Orsted admits that. There is nothing good about this project. The more you learn, the more you read, the more you dig, the more you look into it, the more you realize how very bad this is for all of us.”

Read the full article at OCNJDaily

NEW JERSEY: Early Indicators of Offshore Survey Work Raise Concern for Seafood Production

September 6, 2023 — Beachgoers spent their summer enjoying a reprieve from scorching temperatures, frolicking in the Atlantic Ocean, but marine life had a more difficult summer in the water as seismic testing related to offshore wind surveying is believed, by some, to have caused stress to certain species.

Kirk O. Larson, who has spent more than five decades on the water as a commercial fisherman while serving as Barnegat Light mayor for more than 30 years, said scallops, calamari (squid) and sea bass were among the species to experience stress and disturbance.

In fact, every time seismic testing occurs, sea bass “are hoppling up, scared to death on the bottom of the ocean. They probably won’t spawn this year, like the scallops and the squid. The ramifications down the road, in my mind … You can fact check me next year,” he told a crowd of more than 300 people at Bay Breeze Pavilion in Barnegat Light on Aug. 27.

Read the full article at the Sand Paper

East Coast offshore wind farm delayed due to supply chain issues, high interest, and lack of tax credits

September 5, 2023 — Global wind energy developer Ørsted has announced its planned offshore wind farm off the coast of New Jersey will be delayed until 2026 due to several reasons including supply chain issues.

The company, which is based in Fredericia, Denmark, has several offshore wind farms planned off the coasts of Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, New York and Rhode Island.

The Associated Press reported that the Danish company exposed the delay during an earnings call on Wednesday, admitting it could be forced to write-off about $2.3 billion in U.S. projects worth less than earlier projections.

Read the full article Fox Business

NEW JERSEY: Activist Group Opposes New Jersey Offshore Wind Project

September 2, 2023 — In the seemingly mad rush to achieve the nation’s climate goals and maximize the renewable energy opportunities presented by the Inflation Reduction Act, offshore wind farms are, or will be, cropping up near many miles of U.S. coastline. Activist groups, new and old, continue to mobilize and make their voices heard.

MOVE ’EM OUT, a New Jersey nonprofit organization devoted to preserving the unique charm and ecological balance of the state’s beaches, recently announced its opposition to proposed wind projects, underscoring the detrimental impact on New Jersey’s southern shoreline ecology, local and statewide economy and its vibrant communities.

Read the full article at North American Wind Power

NEW JERSEY: Orsted delays 1st New Jersey wind farm until 2026; not ready to ‘walk away’ from project

September 2, 2023 — Orsted, the global wind energy developer, says its first offshore wind farm in New Jersey will be delayed until 2026 due to supply chain issues, higher interest rates, and a failure so far to garner enough tax credits from the federal government.

The Danish company revealed the delay during an earnings conference call Wednesday, during which it said it could be forced to write off about $2.3 billion on U.S. projects that are worth less than they had been.

It also said it had considered simply abandoning the Ocean Wind I project off the southern New Jersey coast.

Read the full article at the Associated Press 

Poll: Public support for offshore wind power drops sharply in NJ

August 31, 2023 –A new Monmouth University Poll finds that public support for New Jersey offshore wind projects has dropped sharply, with 54 percent of respondents in favor – down from 76 percent the poll reported in 2019.

The decline comes after a long drumbeat of public debate over how the future seaside vista of turbine arrays visible off Jersey Shore resorts could affect the region’s summer tourist economy.

Those arguments heated up with a wave of whale strandings on New Jersey and New York beaches starting in December 2022. Offshore wind opponents tied the deaths to vessels conducting surveys on wind power sites.

Federal agencies insist there is no evidence to link the projects to stranded whales, while marine mammal rescue groups found evidence that dead humpback whales were injured by ship strikes.

Now a majority of New Jersey residents still favor developing offshore wind power, but those numbers are far below what Monmouth University pollsters have found as recently as 2019.

“Four in 10 residents think wind farms could hurt the state’s summer tourism economy and just under half see a connection between wind energy development and the recent spate of whales washing up on New Jersey beaches,” according to a summary from the Monmouth University Poll. “Few see wind energy leading to major job growth in the state.”

The split is 54 percent in favor of offshore wind power and 40 percent opposed. It’s a sharp contrast to early optimism about wind energy for New Jersey, when in 2019 support was at 76 percent with 15 percent opposed.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

Support growing for offshore wind moratorium, by Sen. Vince Polistina

August 29, 2023 — Earlier this month, the Democratic state Senate president and Democratic speaker of the state Assembly released a joint statement echoing our calls for a pause on offshore wind development until more research could be done. Their statements read, in part: “There are still many unanswered questions about the economic impact these projects will have on ratepayers as well as potential impacts to one of our state’s largest economic drivers, tourism at the shore.” A reasonable and rational statement one would expect from their elected officials.

In doing so, the Democratic legislative leaders joined non-partisan, concerned citizens groups like Clean Ocean Action, Defend Brigantine Beach, Save LBI and others, who have called for a pause in the project. For the record, I released my own statement urging Gov. Phil Murphy to suspend the project all the way back in February — calling for a moratorium until scientists could be ascertain what was causing the unusual number of whale and dolphin deaths plaguing our region.

Shortly after I released my statement, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) conceded that New Jersey’s offshore wind farm development “is likely to adversely affect” whales and other marine mammals, while stopping short of solely blaming it for the deaths — copping to something many of us had long-since concluded based on the tragic scenes we had witnessed throughout the late winter and early spring.

Read the full article at the Press of Atlantic City

NEW JERSEY: The future of East Coast wind power could ride on this Jersey beach town

August 9, 2023 — Known as “America’s Greatest Family Resort,” this beachside city now has a new distinction: It has become the epicenter of opposition to wind energy projects off New Jersey and the East Coast.

Residents of Ocean City and surrounding Cape May County, helped by an outside group opposed to renewable energy, are mobilizing to stop Ocean Wind 1, a proposal to build up to 98 wind turbines the size of skyscrapers off the New Jersey coast, which could power half a million homes.

The future of East Coast wind energy could hang in the balance. If opponents succeed, they hope to create a template for derailing some 31 offshore wind projects in various stages of development and construction off the East Coast, a key part of President Biden’s plan to reduce greenhouse emissions that are driving global climate change.

“We have a lot of leverage,” said Frank Coyne, treasurer of Protect Our Coast NJ, which gathered over 500,000 signatures on a petition opposing proposed wind farms. “The objective is to hold them up and make the cost so overwhelming that they’ll go home.”

Read the full article at the Washington Post

4 new offshore wind power projects proposed for New Jersey Shore; 2 would be far out to sea

August 8, 2023 — Wind power developers proposed four new projects off the New Jersey Shore on Friday, a surge that would more than double the number of wind farms built off its coast if they are approved by regulators.

At least two of them are more than twice as far out to sea than others that have drawn the ire of residents who don’t want to see windmills on the horizon. These two would not be visible from the beach, the companies proposing them say.

They would join three wind farms already approved by New Jersey regulators as the state races to become the East Coast capital of the fast-growing offshore wind industry.

In the first project to be made public Friday by the companies proposing it, Essen, Germany-based RWE and New York-based National Grid applied for permission to build a wind farm in the waters off Long Beach Island. Their joint venture is called Community Offshore Wind, and it aims to generate enough electricity to power

Read the full article at the Associated Press