Saving Seafood

What Biden’s New Offshore ‘Wind Energy Area’ Means for NJ, NY and US Clean Energy

March 30, 2021 — The Atlantic Ocean off of New Jersey and New York will become the epicenter of a national effort this decade to energize its power grid with renewable sources like wind and solar after President Joe Biden named the continental shelf off the two states as a “wind energy area.”

The White House’s announcement Monday locks in the federal government to an already all-in race by Mid-Atlantic coastal states to build thousands of skyscraper-sized turbines.

The efforts to build wind farms from North Carolina’s Outer Banks to Cape Cod off of Massachusetts are already nearly a decade in the making, with 17 current projects in development up and down the coast. Several are in planning stages for the waters off of New Jersey and New York. All involve European power companies, including the Danish developer Ørsted, which in 2019 won New Jersey’s first bid for a farm.

For years, the projects languished in a federal queue or permitting processes at the state level. But recently, governors like Phil Murphy in New Jersey have established ambitious goals for renewable energy production from wind farms. Biden’s announcement all but cements offshore wind’s place in the future of American power production.

Only seven wind turbines currently rotate in American waters, but more than 1,500 are in planning or development stages from North Carolina to Massachusetts, according to an NBC10 Philadelphia analysis of the federally leased areas and the 17 projects currently in development.

Read the full story at NBC Washington

Biden to Push Offshore Wind Projects

March 29, 2021 — The Biden administration plans to give wind-power developers access to more of the Atlantic Coast and start a slate of new environmental reviews in an attempt to jump-start the country’s offshore wind business.

White House officials said Monday they want to fast-track leasing in federal waters off the New York and New Jersey coasts, a priority for wind-power interests and state officials.

Much of the concern centers on how wind turbines might affect shipping, whale migrations and commercial fisheries.

The New York Bight is among the country’s three most prolific areas for scallops, said David Frulla, a lawyer who represents the Fisheries Survival Fund, a group including most of the country’s Atlantic Ocean scallop boats.

More turbines will make it harder for large fishing boats to navigate by disrupting the radar they depend on at night, Mr. Frulla said.

“We’re concerned that there’s such a momentum for offshore wind that the fishing industry is going to end up as collateral damage,” Mr. Frulla said.

Read the full story at The Wall Street Journal

New York Approves Offshore Wind Farm Landing Plan

March 19, 2021 — In a major step forward for the proposed South Fork Wind farm, the New York State Public Service Commission voted unanimously on Thursday to issue a conditional Certificate of Environmental Compatibility and Public Need, a requirement in order for the project to move ahead.

The review covered approximately 3.5 miles of the installation’s export cable from the state territorial waters boundary to the south shore of the Town of East Hampton, and approximately 4.1 miles of the cable on an underground path to a Long Island Power Authority substation in East Hampton.

The developers, Orsted U.S. Offshore Wind and Eversource Energy, plan to land the cable on the ocean beach off Beach Lane in Wainscott, which has sparked furious opposition from a well-funded group called Citizens for the Preservation of Wainscott. The group is seeking to incorporate the hamlet of Wainscott as a self-governing village to thwart that landing location.

“In this proceeding, the parties that opposed the proposal argued that the project is not needed or that it does not appropriately avoid or minimize environmental impacts, including impacts to commercial fishers,” Administrative Law Judge Anthony Belsito told the P.S.C. “However . . . the record fully supports a finding that the facility is necessary to transmit electricity from the proposed offshore South Fork Wind farm generation facility to the point of interconnection at the East Hampton substation to meet the needs identified by the Long Island Power Authority in its 2015 request for proposals regarding the energy needs of the South Fork of Long Island.”

Read the full story at the East Hampton Star

 

On U.S. East Coast, Has Offshore Wind’s Moment Finally Arrived?

February 24, 2021 — About 60 miles east of New York’s Montauk Point, a 128,000-acre expanse of the Atlantic Ocean is expected to produce enough electricity to power around 850,000 homes when it’s populated with wind turbines and connected to the onshore grid in the next few years.

Fifteen miles off Atlantic City, New Jersey, another windy swath of ocean is due to start generating enough power for some 500,000 homes when a forest of 850-foot-high turbines start turning there in 2024.

And off the Virginia coast some 200 miles to the south, a utility-led offshore wind project is scheduled to produce carbon-free power equivalent to taking 1 million cars off the road when it is complete in 2026.

The fledgling U.S. offshore wind industry is finally poised to become a commercial reality off the northeast and mid-Atlantic coasts within the next five years, thanks to robust commitments to buy its power from seven coastal states, new support from the Biden administration, and billions of dollars in investment by an industry that sees a huge market for electric power in Eastern states.

New York, New Jersey, Virginia, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Maryland have together committed, through legislation or executive action, to buying about 30,000 megawatts (MW) of offshore electricity by 2035 — enough to power roughly 20 million homes, according to the American Clean Power Association (ACPA), which advocates for renewable energy. Projects totaling 11,000 MW have been awarded so far.

Read the full story at Yale Environment 360

NEW YORK: Today is Deadline for Comments on South Fork Wind Farm Environmental Report

February 22, 2021 — The federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), which recently finished its draft environmental review of the South Fork Wind Farm, gave the public a chance to weigh in on the document at three virtual public hearings in mid-February, and is accepting further written public comment through midnight tonight.

While much of the focus on the wind farm locally over the past several years has been the local and New York State Public Service Commission review of the wind farm’s export cable, currently slated to come ashore at Beach Lane in Wainscott en route to a substation in East Hampton, the BOEM review focuses on the wind farm itself, 15 turbines slated to be placed in federal waters about 30 miles off the coast of Montauk.

At the series of virtual hearings on BOEM’s Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) for the wind farm, many labor union leaders spoke in favor of the wind farms, while many representatives of fishing communities in both Rhode Island and Montauk expressed concern not only about this wind farm, but about what the future development of the wind farm area surrounding the South Fork Wind Farm, which could be developed on a scale orders of magnitude greater than this wind farm.

Local environmentalists also weighed in on the project, expressing support both for the project and for robust environmental protections and review during the construction and operation of the wind farm.

Some commenters also weighed in with concerns about the reliability of wind turbines, especially in the wake of the disastrous blow that cold weather dealt to the Texas energy industry in mid-February, which some lawmakers blamed on frozen wind turbines, which played a small role in the energy grid shutdown there.

Read the full story at The East End Beacon

Acme Smoked Fish Co-Chairman Eric Caslow dies

February 19, 2021 — Acme Smoked Fish Co-Chairman Eric Caslow has died, the company said in a press release issued 18 February. The company did not announce the cause of death.

Along with his brother, Robert Caslow, who remains company co-chairman, Eric Caslow was the third generation of his family to run the Brooklyn, New York, U.S.A.-based fish smoker, which was founded in 1906 and has grown into one of the largest fish-smoking companies in the United States.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

NEW YORK: Cable Landing Simmers While Federal Wind Farm Review Is Just Heating Up

February 11, 2021 — While the public debate over the South Fork Wind Farm cable landing in Wainscott has shifted to court filings and the village incorporation effort, the public stage of the federal application for the wind farm itself is just getting started — and advocates for local fishermen say that the most important aspects of the project have yet to be settled.

Whether turbine foundations will be hammered into the heart of one of the most fabled fishing regions off Montauk and whether commercial fishermen will be compensated for lost fishing time or damaged fishing gear are both still up in the air as the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and a dozen other federal agencies continue their examination of the project as proposed by Danish wind farm developer Ørsted and it’s American domestic partner, Eversource.

The federal regulators on Tuesday held the first of three public comment sessions on the project’s Draft Environmental Impact Statement, the 800-plus-page main outline of the project and the various considerations for its design. The will be additional comment sessions on February 11 and 16. The meetings are being held via Zoom and registration and the full details of the project are available at www.boem.gov/renewable-energy/south-fork-wind-farm-virtual-meetings.

Read the full story at the Sag Harbor Express

Atlantic surf clams: With restaurant sales down, processors focus on retail

February 8, 2021 — Consumer demand for Atlantic surf clams and ocean quahogs has shifted in the past six months. Most of the fleet is centered around Point Pleasant Beach and Atlantic City, N.J.; Oceanview, N.Y.; Hyannis, Mass. (surf clams only); and New Bedford and Fairhaven, Mass. There is also a quahog fishery in Maine. 

Chris Shriver, general manager of Atlantic Capes Fisheries, a large processor headquartered in Massachusetts, says covid-19 has affected markets.

“A lot of our product does sell to the restaurant sector, wholesale, and to chains. All were impacted, due to the closures and limited seatings.” Shriver says some states are starting to open up a little, and that clam products from Rhode Island were still able to be sold locally in fry shacks and take-out establishments.

“But we’re all fearful for the next shoe to drop,” Shriver says. While Atlantic Capes does not produce canned products, they have substantial retail and soup manufacturing markets. The upshot is “there has definitely been an uptick in the retail sector.” But, adds Shriver, it is difficult to make up for the lost restaurant markets. 

Landings for surf clams, ocean quahog and Maine quahog are short of what they were at this time last year. By mid-September 2020, 32.5 percent of the surf clam quota (3.4 million bushels) and 25.5 percent of ocean quahog quota (5.33 million bushels) was harvested. Maine’s quahog fishery had harvested 10 percent of the 100,000-bushel quota for the state.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Northeast scup: With abundant biomass, fishermen look to expand market post-pandemic

February 8, 2021 — Commercial scup, or porgy, landings peaked in 1981 at 21.73 million pounds but dipped to 2.66 million pounds by 2000. In recent years, commercial fishermen have not landed the commercial quota, and there have been industry-wide efforts focused on closing the gap.

The commercial fishery is year-round, and mostly in federal waters during the winter and state waters during the summer. A coastwide commercial quota is allocated between three quota periods: winter I, summer and winter II. Total ex-vessel value in 2018 was $9.70 million, resulting in an average price per pound of $0.73. NOAA data shows landings from October to the end of December 2020 are below last year’s landings.

Despite being highly abundant, and not considered overfished, the industry has grappled with achieving a harvest of the full quota every year, in part because commercial fishermen often do not fish for scup when the dock price is depressed. If market demand were increased, prices and opportunities for fleets to harvest the fish would follow. 

Dave Aripotch, a commercial scup commercial fisherman in Montauk, N.Y., says 2020 was decent, but that he pulled in less volume than previous years.

“A lot of times with scup, if you catch them, you catch a lot of them. This year, there were a lot of small and mediums around, and this means the market gets plugged even for jumbo.”

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Black sea bass more abundant in Long Island Sound as water warms

January 29, 2021 — Scientists at the Northeast Fisheries Science Center’s Milford Laboratory in Connecticut documented a distinct shift in Long Island Sound fish abundance, with black sea bass showing up in increasing numbers while winter flounder declined.

The findings recently published in Fishery Bulletin are another confirmation of the steady spread northward of black sea bass – now extending into the Gulf of Maine – as waters warm off the Northeast coast.

According to a narrative issued Thursday by the National Marine Fisheries Service, two warm-adapted species: black sea bass, a commercially and recreationally important fish, and oyster toadfish became more abundant in recent samples.

Oyster toadfish prefer rocky habitats and are not often captured by trawl surveys. Meanwhile, cold-adapted species, including cunner and grubby, declined in numbers over the course of the study.

Winter flounder, also a commercial species, and rock gunnel were notably absent in more recent years. Long-term trawl data collected by the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection suggests winter flounder abundance has been declining in the Sound for 20 years. The scientists found no consistent trend in the abundance of tautog and scup, two temperate residents of Long Island Sound. The species are often captured on video by our GoPro Aquaculture Project.

Read the full story at National Fisherman