Saving Seafood

NEW JERSEY: Feds extend comment period for offshore wind project

August 4, 2022 — The federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management extended the deadline for public comment on the environmental impacts of an offshore wind project after facing complaints 45 days was not long enough to review the 1,408-page impact statement.

Some Jersey Shore residents, environmentalists and politicians pushed the bureau to extend the timeline for public input on Ocean Wind 1, a project by Denmark-based energy company Ørsted and Newark-based power company Public Service Enterprise Group. Many voiced concerns at public hearings that the proposed 1,100-megawatt offshore wind farm would irreparably harm New Jersey’s fishing industry, negatively affect endangered the North Atlantic Right Whale and disrupt the ecosystems and migration routes of various marine and coastal animals.

The project has been touted by state officials and many environmentalists as an important step in reducing New Jersey’s reliance on fossil fuels, a contributor to global climate change and rising sea levels. If approved, it would be located about 15 miles offshore near Atlantic City and provide enough energy to power 500,000 New Jersey homes, according to Ørsted.

Read the full article at app.

Seven fisheries surveys for New Jersey offshore wind project

July 28, 2022 — Developers of the first New Jersey offshore wind project say they will spend almost $13 million for fisheries monitoring surveys in cooperation with three universities.

Ocean Wind 1, an 1,100-megawatt project 15 miles off Atlantic City, N.J., now includes a fisheries monitoring plan developed along guidelines from the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, according to a statement Wednesday from wind developers Ørsted.

The plan is built around a suite of seven monitoring projects with Rutgers University, Delaware State University and Monmouth University. One will be a first-of-its-kind study for U.S. offshore wind, using environmental DNA from ocean sampling to monitor and assess local fish abundance and biodiversity in the Ocean Wind 1 lease area.

Research work has begun before construction and will proceed at sea on local commercial fishing vessels, during six years through project construction and after.

The five-turbine, 30 MW Block Island pilot project began in 2016 and became an attraction for recreational fishing, with black sea bass and other fish drawn to the new underwater structure.

The scale and impact of Ocean Wind 1 on fisheries is a subject of intense debate.

Recent studies from Rutgers researchers found that planned wind turbine arrays could displace the Mid-Atlantic based surf clam industry enough to reduce its revenue by 15 percent. That loss could be as much as 25 percent for boats based at Atlantic City, a historic hub for the fleet, the researchers estimated.

“The structure of this part of the ocean, the Middle Atlantic Bight continental shelf, is unique among oceanic provinces due to its extreme seasonal temperature range and vertical layering. Migration and ranging are an important part of fish life cycles here as a result, and this makes it challenging to tease out responses to the wind farm specifically,” said the lead principal investigator Thomas Grothues, an associate research professor in the Department of Marine and Coastal Sciences of Rutgers-New Brunswick’s School of Environmental and Biological Sciences.

Read the full article at National Fisherman

NEW JERSEY: Jersey Shore residents demand more time to review offshore wind project

July 28, 2022 — Jersey Shore residents, environmentalists and business industry advocates remain divided over whether to speed ahead or spend more time reviewing the environmental impacts of a plan to build a 1,100-megawatt offshore wind farm south of Atlantic City.

Ocean Wind 1 ― a project by Denmark-based energy company Ørsted and Newark-based power company Public Service Enterprise Group, or PSEG — could power up to half a million homes in New Jersey once complete, according to Ørsted.

But some environmentalists and coastal residents worry the potential impacts of the wind turbine array could disrupt the migration of critically endangered whales, irreparably harm the local fishing industry and ruin tourists’ views from shore.

During a Tuesday hearing held virtually with the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which oversees approval of the Ocean Wind 1 project, Seaside Park Mayor John A. Peterson Jr. urged the federal agency to grant an extension to the public response and review period for the project’s environmental impact. Peterson also requested all offshore wind project approvals along New Jersey be delayed until a pilot project was erected and carefully studied.

Ocean Wind 1’s environmental impact statement “is a 1,400-page document and it is far too complex, far too vast an issue to take lightly,” the mayor said during the hearing’s public comment session. “This is an insufficient time period, I believe, for the public and for any and all other interested parties, including but not limited to municipalities, to comment on something of vast ramifications for the future.”

OEM’s consideration of Ocean Wind 1’s impacts failed to account for the cumulative impact of neighboring offshore wind projects along the Jersey Shore, Peterson said. Other projects ― a 2,200-megawatt project by Ørsted called Ocean Wind 2 to the south and two projects by Atlantic Shores Offshore Wind, LLC stretching as far north as Barnegat Light ― are in development or under consideration by federal and state agencies. Atlantic Shores has secured another ocean lease area from BOEM and New York east of Atlantic City.

Read the full article at The Asbury Park Press

BOEM says New York Bight offshore wind environment review will focus on regional impact

July 14, 2022 — The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management announced Wednesday it will move forward with a regional environmental review of six lease areas in the New York Bight.

A February 2022 lease auction by BOEM brought in over $4.3 billion – a record amount for any U.S. offshore renewable or conventional energy lease sale. BOEM officials say this will be the first time the agency has conducted a regional analysis of multiple lease areas for offshore renewable energy.

OEM will publish a Notice of Intent (NOI) to prepare a Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) in the Federal Register on July 15, 2022, which will initiate a 30-day public comment scoping period. Comments gathered during this time will help BOEM identify what it should consider as part of the PEIS.

Read the full story at the National Fisherman

Offshore wind farms could reduce Atlantic City’s surfclam fishery revenue up to 25%, Rutgers study suggests

July 1, 2022 — New research from Rutgers University shows Mid-Atlantic surfclam fisheries could see revenue losses from planned offshore wind farms, at least in the short- to medium-term after the development takes place.

The data is sure to fuel opposition from the fishing industry to the Biden administration’s rapid offshore wind development along the New York, New Jersey, and Delaware coasts. President Joe Biden has a goal of generating 30 gigawatts of wind energy by 2030 as part of his effort to tackle climate change.

Clammers and scallop fishermen fear a shrinking patch of fishable ocean will lead to the collapse of the industry.

Surfclam harvests stretching from Maine to Virginia generate about $30 million in annual revenue. The Rutgers study, “The Atlantic Surfclam Fishery and Offshore Wind Energy Development,” published in the ICES Journal of Marine Science, used a newly-developed model to determine average revenue reductions between 3 and 15% overall.

Read the full story at WHYY

NEW JERSEY: Ocean City seeks to divert wind power plan

June 27, 2022 — City attorney Dorothy McCrosson took aim at plans to run a power line across the city at 35th Street at a Friday morning hearing of the state Board of Public Utilities, arguing there are other options to bring wind power to shore.

The BPU board heard oral arguments in a request for Ocean Wind 1, planned as the first large-scale offshore wind farm off the coast of New Jersey that is projected to power a half-million homes.

First, the wind-generated power needs to get to shore. As attorney Greg Eisenstark said, speaking on behalf of the applicant, there are no power customers in the ocean.

He added there are few practical options along the coast to bring electricity from the ocean to the power grid. As proposed, the project would bring power to the former B.L. England plant on the bank of the Great Egg Harbor Bay in Upper Township, with another landing site at the former Oyster Creek nuclear plant in Ocean County.

Read the full story and listen to the audio at The Press of Atlantic City

 

Surf clam fleet could take big hit from offshore wind

June 24, 2022 — Offshore wind projects off the East Coast could take up to a 15 percent bite out of the surf clam industry’s $30 million annual revenue, according to two new studies from Rutgers University researchers.

The biggest loss could be up to 25 percent for boats based in Atlantic City, N.J., a historic center for the fishery.

The paired studies, published in the ICES Journal of Marine Science, show how total fleet revenue may range from 3 percent to 15 percent, “depending on the scale of offshore wind development and response of the fishing fleet.”

The researchers developed a complex computer model to predict how the surf clam fishery may change in response to large-scale wind turbine arrays – such as the 1,100-megawatt Ocean Wind 1 project planned off Atlantic City.

“Understanding the impacts of fishery exclusion and fishing effort displacement from development of offshore wind energy is critical to the sustainability of the Atlantic surf clam fishing industry,” according to co-author Daphne Munroe, an associate professor in the Department of Marine and Coastal Sciences. Munroe and the research team worked closely with fishermen and the clam industry in developing the model.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

As feds eye more wind leases off Virginia, fishing industries fear losses

June 23, 2022 — Today, two wind turbines turn off Virginia’s coast. But by the middle of the next decade, hundreds more may have joined them.

With a major push underway by President Joe Biden’s administration to develop 30 gigawatts of offshore wind as a way to reduce U.S. reliance on fossil fuels, federal officials are looking to dramatically expand the areas where wind farms can be built in U.S. waters.

Virginia is an epicenter of interest: Of 4 million acres of ocean identified as potential wind energy areas in a new Central Atlantic call area, most lie off the Virginia coast.

For the commonwealth’s fishing industries, already wary of what their business will look like once Dominion Energy’s 176-turbine Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project is constructed, the prospect of a much more expansive buildout of wind power throughout the rich fishing grounds off Virginia is sparking fears that the new industry will drive out the old.

“We know that when these lease areas are built out, it is going to be displacing fishermen, who are then going to be working smaller and smaller areas with more and more boats, which is going to lead to localized depletion,” said Tom Dameron, government relations and fisheries science liaison for Surfside Foods, a New Jersey-based commercial clam fishing company that last year landed roughly 10 percent of the East Coast’s entire surf clam harvest in Cape Charles.

Read the full story at the Virginia Mercury

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

 

Proposed N.J. wind farm could have major impact on area fisheries, draft report says

June 20, 2022 — A proposed wind farm off the Jersey Shore could significantly affect local fisheries and boat traffic but generally have little impact on tourism and marine life while helping to move away from oil and gas, according to the draft environmental impact statement released Friday by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.

The impact statement is the next step toward winning federal approval for Ocean Wind, a wind farm to be built by the Danish energy company Ørsted and PSEG.

The draft statement addressed concerns by officials in some New Jersey beach towns that the turbines would spoil the ocean views and discourage tourists from returning.

It said the impact of the wind farm would be moderate on tourism due to noise from construction and the new structures, but that the wind turbines could attract tourists eager to see them.

The impact on cultural artifacts could be significant as “the introduction of intrusive visual elements” could “alter character-defining ocean views of historic properties onshore” and work on the ocean floor could disturb shipwrecks or submerged archaeological sites, the statement said.

And the significant impacts on fisheries could be attributed to ongoing regulations, climate change and the disruptions to operations by the construction and installation of the turbines, the report said. Some fishing vessels would decide to avoid the area altogether.

Read the full story at NJ.com