Saving Seafood

European Energy Giants Still Dominate Future of Offshore Wind in US

March 4, 2022 — A group led by two American companies shelled out $645 million last week for the future development rights of an offshore wind farm off the New Jersey coast.

Invenergy Wind Offshore LLC, which is a partnership led by Chicago-based Invenergy and New York-based energyRe, now owns the rights to 84,000 acres where company officials believe 2,000 megawatts of renewable energy can be harnessed using turbines larger than the Washington Monument.

“We’re very happy where we are, and it’s a huge opportunity for our two American companies to really shine,” energyRe Chairman Jeff Blau said in an interview Thursday.

Despite the Invenergy group’s win, the federal auction proved that European energy giants still dominate the burgeoning offshore wind industry. The other five leases up for auction were grabbed by companies based in Spain, Great Britain, France and Germany. (One of those five does include a New York investment firm.) In total, the six leases raised a whopping $4.4 billion for the federal government.

European energy companies already own most of the 17 leases awarded between 2013 and 2018. Industry experts say those foreign conglomerates have head starts from their decades of experience building wind farms in Europe. Most are former fossil fuel companies that years ago began renewable energy subsidiaries.

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

Sale of Leases for Wind Farms Off New York Raises More Than $4 Billion

February 28, 2022 — The United States government netted a record $4.37 billion on Friday from the sale of six offshore wind leases off the coasts of New York and New Jersey, a major step in the Biden administration’s goal of ushering in a future powered by renewable energy.

The auction, of more than 488,000 acres in the Atlantic Ocean between Cape May, N.J., and Montauk Point, N.Y., was the Biden administration’s first offshore lease sale.

When turbines are built and start working, the auctioned acres are expected to generate up to 7,000 megawatts, enough to power nearly 2 million homes.

The Interior Department has said between that project and others currently under review, it hopes to see some 2,000 turbines churning from Massachusetts to North Carolina by the end of this decade.

Read the full story at the New York Times

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

 

U.S. offshore wind auction bids top $1.5 bln, with more to come

February 24, 2022 — The largest ever U.S. sale of offshore wind development rights – for areas off the coasts of New York and New Jersey – attracted a record $1.5 billion in bids on Wednesday, supporting President Joe Biden’s plan to create a new domestic industry.

The auction, which will continue on Thursday, is the first offshore wind lease sale under Biden, who has made expansion of offshore wind a cornerstone of his plans to tackle global warming and decarbonize the U.S. electricity grid by 2035, while creating tens of thousands of jobs.

After 21 rounds of bidding, combined live bids for the six leases stood at nearly $1.54 billion, according to updates posted on the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s (BOEM) web site.

That easily topped the U.S. offshore wind auction record of $405 million set in 2018. It was also far more than recent oil and gas auctions in U.S. federal waters. A sale of drilling rights in the Gulf of Mexico late last year, for instance, attracted $191.7 million in high bids.

Read the full story at Reuters

What to watch in Biden’s first offshore wind auction

February 24, 2022 — The Biden administration will hold a long-awaited offshore wind auction today, with both established players in the developing industry and new competitors expected to vie for a chance to raise turbines in the shallow-water region sandwiched between New Jersey and New York.

Industry has long pushed for a new auction in the New York Bight, where developers haven’t seen a lease sale since 2016, and expectations are high that it could result in a blockbuster sale.

“These leases will, in all likelihood, fetch historically high prices,” said Fred Zalcman, director of New York Offshore Wind Alliance, which advocates for the industry. “I think it’s going to be a very vibrant market.”

The bight offers acreage between two states with some of the most aggressive offshore wind targets in the country.

Read the full story at E&E News

Lawmakers eye grants to fund innovation to save right whales

February 22, 2022 — Lawmakers from Massachusetts and New Jersey want to set up a new grant program to help develop technology that assists in saving a rare species of whale from extinction.

The North Atlantic right whale numbers less than 340 and faces threats from collisions with large ships and entanglement in fishing gear. They are the subject of numerous new fishing rules designed to improve their chances of survival.

Read the full story from the Associated Press

 

Federal lawmakers want to save the North Atlantic right whale

February 18, 2022 — One of New England’s most critically endangered species is getting some love from federal legislators.

On Thursday, Congressional Democrats introduced a bill focused on saving the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale. The legislation, introduced by Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts and Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, would start a new grant program, making $15 million available each year for the next decade to projects that can reduce the risks of entanglement in fishing gear and vessel strikes.

North Atlantic right whales live almost exclusively along the eastern coasts of the United States and Canada. Many spend time in late winter and early spring feeding in Cape Cod Bay.

Read the full story at the Boston Globe

SCEMFIS: New Survey Will Help Fill Gaps in Menhaden Count in New England, Mid-Atlantic

January 14, 2022 — The Science Center for Marine Fisheries (SCEMFIS) highlighted a new project that will look to count a population of menhaden that could help inform not only a local New Jersey fishery but other fisheries in New England and the Mid-Atlantic region.

A team from the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science’s (UMCES) Chesapeake Biological Laboratory and the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, in collaboration with NOAA Fisheries are on the verge of launching a winter population survey of menhaden, specifically off the coast of New Jersey, SCEMFIS said.

That area is home to a growing winter bait fishery but because there hasn’t been much work to survey the population that far north, there is not a strong enough count of how many fish are in that area.

The survey, which will launch from Cape May, New Jersey, will use sonar equipment to estimate the number of menhaden schooling in the area, and will collect additional information to estimate age, size, and weight, data that will be important for managing the fishery, per SCEMFIS.

Read the full story at Seafood News

Growing fishery? NOAA to work on winter survey of menhaden off N.J. coast

January 14, 2022 — The surprising news last weekend was not just the striped bass bite on the Ocean County beaches, but the numbers of menhaden off the coast here in January. NOAA has also taken notice of the baitfish and is collaborating on a survey of their winter population here.

The researchers that are working on it are from the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science’s (UMCES) Chesapeake Biological Laboratory and the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, in collaboration with NOAA Fisheries. The winter population survey of menhaden will specifically look at the menhaden spending the season off the coast of New Jersey.

According to the Science Center for Marine Fisheries in Virginia which released a statement on the survey, the researchers believe New Jersey is home to a growing winter bait fishery but there have been few attempts to survey menhaden this far north and there is currently not a good count of how many menhaden are in the area. Data is also lacking on measurements like age and weight compositions.

Read the full story at the Asbury Park Press