Saving Seafood

NEW YORK: Foundations of South Fork wind farm off of Long Island now complete

August 10, 2023 — Installation of 13 foundations for the nation’s first major offshore wind farm is now complete off the coast of Long Island.

It’s named South Fork. It will be the first of five wind farms in the works. The project site is located roughly 35 miles east of Montauk.

Twelve wind turbines and a wind substation will be constructed at the site. Installation of the turbines is expected to begin later this summer and into the fall. Meanwhile, work continues at the site, including the installation of cables to connect the wind turbines to the offshore substation.

Read the full article at CBS News

Warmer waters are affecting fish and coral in Long Island Sound, experts say

August 7, 2023 — Warming waters are affecting a variety of marine life in Long Island Sound.

The sound is actually home to coral – the Northern Star Coral – and the species is helping New England scientists learn how warmer water linked to climate change might affect coral found in the tropics, too.

Shawn Grace, a marine ecologist and biology professor at southern Connecticut State University, is studying the long-term effects of Northern Star Coral that never went dormant last winter. He said temperatures were too high in Long Island Sound, so the coral stayed active.

“We brought some in just to check what they were feeding on. And yeah, they were actively feeding throughout the entire winter,” Grace told Connecticut Public’s “Where We Live.” “For me, this is the first winter that we’ve ever experienced this.”

Grace said there are thousands of colonies of corals to study – both in Long Island Sound and Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island.

Read the full article nhpr

Stalled coastal wind power projects imperil Biden’s climate agenda

July 26, 2023 — A grim financial outlook for the country’s offshore wind power industry is threatening President Joe Biden’s most important energy plans.

The administration is counting on offshore wind farms to produce at least enough power for 10 million American homes by the end of the decade.

Up and down the Northeast — the center of the burgeoning industry — however, energy companies have struggled to finance their projects, going hat in hand to governors and utility regulators asking for more money so they can start building the turbines they have already promised to deliver.

The energy developers’ requests have caused unrest in statehouses and among a public wary of already-rising power bills. But without a dramatic increase in offshore wind capacity, there is no way Biden or two of the nation’s greenest Democratic governors — New York’s Kathy Hochul and New Jersey’s Phil Murphy — can hope to meet their climate change goals.

“This is a pretty fragile time in the offshore wind industry,” said Molly Morris, president of Equinor Wind US, which is developing three projects to serve New York.

Read the full article at Politico

Modern Problems for the Ancient Horseshoe Crab

July 16, 2023 — The horseshoe crab starts its extraordinary annual migration to the East End not in Manhattan but on the continental shelf, in the dark, under hundreds of feet of water. Some ancient instinct, strengthened over nearly 500 million years of life on earth, tells it to begin, and over the course of months it edges closer to our shoreline, until the waters become shallow and the crab’s days slowly brighten.

On a full moon tide in May, its journey is complete, and along the bottom of our bays, hundreds pair off. The smaller male attaches to the larger female, who finds a suitable beach to lay her eggs. She buries herself five to 10 centimeters into the sand and deposits upward of 10,000 eggs before the male fertilizes them.

“She drags him around. He’s sort of along for the ride,” said Matt Sclafani, who works for the Cornell Cooperative Extension, and runs the horseshoe crab monitoring network in New York on behalf of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. “The female pumps the water with her gills to help increase the fertilization success.” Satellite males, unattached to the female, also can externally fertilize some of the eggs.

Read the full article at The East Hampton Star

NEW YORK: First monopile foundation completed for New York offshore wind project

June 26, 2023 — Yesterday, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul announced that South Fork Wind, New York’s first offshore wind farm, has achieved its “steel in the water” milestone with the installation of the project’s first monopile foundation.

Later this summer, South Fork Wind will install the project’s U.S.-built offshore substation. The project remains on-track to become the first U.S. utility-scale offshore wind farm to be completed in federal waters. The goal of the project is to develop 9,000 megawatts of offshore wind by 2035.

The announcement comes just two weeks after the completion of the first monopile foundation at Vineyard Wind 1, the nation’s first commercial-scale offshore wind project.

The two projects will be staged out of the ports of New London, Conn., and New Bedford, Mass., using local labor and supply chain participants. Additional foundation components for South Fork Wind were fabricated in Providence, R.I. Advancement of the South Fork Wind project includes additional key U.S. milestones, as the project includes the first U.S.-built substation for offshore wind and will be serviced by the ECO Edison, the first U.S.-built service operation vessel for offshore wind.

Read the full article at WorkBoat

NEW YORK: NY offshore wind developers also seek price relief

June 8, 2023 — MAJOR OFFSHORE wind developers in New York say their projects may no longer be financially viable unless regulators amend their power purchase agreements to include adjustments for inflation and interconnection costs.

In petitions filed with state regulators on Wednesday, the New York wind farm operators followed the same script as developers in Massachusetts, who say their projects have been overwhelmed by inflation, rising interest rates, supply chain disruption, and the war in Ukraine.

The Massachusetts developers initially sought to modify their existing power purchase agreements, but when that plea fell on deaf ears at the Department of Public Utilities they moved to terminate the agreements they signed last year and rebid the projects at higher prices in a procurement coming in 2024.

In New York, the developers are asking state regulators to agree to price adjustments in the existing contracts. They point out that New York has approved including similar price adjustments as part of the state’s third offshore wind procurement process, and now should retroactively apply them to contracts approved in the first two procurements.

Read the full article at Common Wealth

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

New York’s Wind Power Future Is Taking Shape. In Rhode Island.

February 22, 2023 — When Gov. Kathy Hochul laid out her plan for accelerating the development of New York’s offshore wind industry a year ago, she promised thousands of jobs for state residents.

Today, New York’s first wind farm in the Atlantic Ocean is under construction. Crews in hard hats are assembling platforms for giant turbines and building boats that will ferry technicians onto the water to ensure the massive blades keep rotating.

But the work is not being done in New York. It is happening more than 150 miles away in Rhode Island.

States and cities all along the East Coast are vying with New York to be hubs for the fast-growing business of harnessing wind power offshore. But Rhode Island took the lead by building the first offshore wind farm in the United States several years ago. Centrally located among projects planned from New York to Massachusetts, the nation’s smallest state has held on to many of the jobs and economic benefits that go with being first.

Read the full article at The New York Times

What we know — and don’t know — about offshore wind and whale deaths

February 9, 2023 — Offshore wind development in US East Coast waters has been blamed for a flurry of dead humpback whales off New Jersey and New York. But what do — and don’t — we know?

Since 2016 there has been an unusually high incidence of humpback whale deaths on the US East Coast: a total of 180 animals, of which about 40 percent had evidence of entanglement in fishing gear or being struck by vessels. The US National Marine Fisheries Service works with other organizations to examine dead whales found at sea or beached to determine the cause of death. The other cases remain undiagnosed because of decomposition, the inability to tow the whale ashore, lack of access to the whale, or an indeterminate cause.

Investigations of large whale mortalities can take many months, but NMFS has stated that the recent mortalities show no relation to offshore wind development. So what are the potential risks for whales of offshore wind development?

Marine mammals are sensitive to noise, which can result from weather events, earthquakes, and human sources, such as sonar, bottom drilling and coring, seismic air guns, and explosions. The effects can range from behavioral change to temporary or permanent hearing loss, and occasionally mortality. Most deaths related to acoustic exposure have been in toothed whales and dolphins related to sonar. There has been no recent evidence of humpback or other baleen whales dying from noise exposure.

Read the full article at the Boston Globe