Saving Seafood

NEW YORK: NYPA to lead offshore wind study; LIPA will also have role

August 9, 2018 — A memorandum of understanding has been signed by New York power agencies and partners to conduct a study of successful offshore wind transmission models, with a specific focus on large-scale European projects, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said on Aug. 8.

The New York Power Authority will lead the study and a number of parties including the Long Island Power Authority will collaborate with NYPA on the initial phase of the research.

Input gained from the study will help determine the optimal infrastructure required to support offshore wind targets set by the governor.

Earlier this year, Cuomo announced the New York State Offshore Wind Master Plan, which will guide the state in the development of 2,400 megawatts of offshore wind by 2030. The plan describes the conditions needed for the state to achieve its offshore wind target and indicates the need for future technical studies and analyses to advance the most cost-effective and responsible development.

Cuomo’s office said the findings of the study will be timely as the state looks at transmission costs which the master plan estimates could comprise 30 percent of total costs of an offshore wind development.

Particular attention will be given in the study to the physical design, including radial and network connections and interconnections between the projects and to the respective onshore transmission systems as well as development and rate structures.

It will also focus on the ownership structures, business models and financing approaches used in each jurisdiction, as well as the regulatory approaches governing transmission development and cost recovery.

Read the full story at the American Public Power Association

NEW YORK: East Hampton Trustees To Discuss Hiring Counsel for Deepwater Wind

August 9, 2018 — The Town Trustees in East Hampton will continue to debate the potential landing of a wind farm cable in Wainscott next week, as Deepwater Wind, the offshore wind company proposing the South Fork Wind Farm roughly 30 miles off the coast of Montauk, announced last week it will begin a seafloor survey of its leased sea bottom lands off Montauk and off the coast of Rhode Island to assist with the design and construction of proposed wind farms in both locations.

The Trustees are expected to hold an executive session during a meeting next Monday to discuss hiring special counsel to represent the body in negotiations over a community benefits package being floated by Deepwater Wind in connection to a request by the firm to land the South Fork Wind Farm power cable off Beach Lane in Wainscott. In order to do that, Deepwater Wind needs to secure easements from both the East Hampton Town Board and East Hampton Town Trustees.

In July, the East Hampton Town Board voted, 3-2, to hire its own counsel to draft an agreement to grant Deepwater Wind easement to run its cable from the beach under local streets to an existing LIPA substation off Cove Hollow Road. Members who voted in favor of the resolution also memorialized their support for the project in its resolution. Councilmembers Jeffrey Bragman and David Lys voted against the measure.

According to Trustee Clerk Francis Bock, the trustees, who manage wetlands, waterways and beaches in the town, are “pretty split” on whether to allow Deepwater Wind access to Beach Lane. A committee, made up of trustees Rick Drew, John Aldred, Susan McGraw Keber and James Grimes, has been formed to make a recommendation to the body on the hiring of outside counsel to represent the board in the state and federal review of the 15-turbine project. Mr. Bock said that counsel, if trustees do come to accord, would also be used to draft any agreement between trustees and Deepwater Wind specific to the benefits package.

Read the full story at the Sag Harbor Express

NY ratepayers will pay for $2.1B offshore wind plan, but won’t get the energy

August 8, 2018 — New York state ratepayers will pick up the tab for the Cuomo Administration’s multi-billion dollar plan to jump-start the offshore wind industry, but most won’t benefit from the energy produced.

Only consumers in Long Island and New York City will be able to access the wind-powered energy that’s going to be generated in the waters off the state’s Atlantic coast in the years to come.

As soon as 2020, typical residential ratepayers could see an increase of up to 76 cents a month in their electric bills as the state goes all-in on offshore wind as a critical piece of the state’s renewable energy future, The Journal News/Poughkeepsie Journal has learned.

That’s in addition to the average $2 per month charge state ratepayers are already paying for the bailout of three struggling upstate nuclear power plants for the next ten years.

The New York State Public Service Commission announced last week that it had agreed to procure some 800 megawatts of offshore wind energy over the next two years, the first phase in an effort to develop 2,400 megawatts of offshore wind energy by 2030, enough to power 1.2 million households in New York City and Long Island.

“Robust offshore wind development is not only critical to meeting our clean energy and carbon reduction goals, this investment has the potential to create thousands of jobs and fuel a $6 billion industry for New York as it combats climate change,” Cuomo said.

The Long Island Commercial Fishing Association (LICFA), based in Montauk, have joined a lawsuit challenging the decision by the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to allow thousands of acres off the Atlantic coast of Long Island to be leased to offshore wind companies.

The six areas available for lease could hold up to 200 wind turbines.

“The historical, traditional commercial fishing communities of Long Island, which include hundreds of small business owners, the very tax and rate-payers whose businesses help to support other small businesses throughout Long Island, are ground zero for having their very livelihoods and businesses destroyed,” Bonnie Brady, the executive director of LICFA wrote in April.

Read the full story from the Poughkeepsie Journal at the Ithaca Journal

Bay State Wind alters layout for offshore wind farm, but fisheries call foul

August 8, 2018 — Bay State Wind LLC is changing the turbine layout of its 800-MW Bay State Offshore Wind Project to accommodate the U.S. commercial fishing industry’s ability to work between turbines. But fisheries say the changes are too little, too late and underscore their growing frustration with the offshore wind sector.

Bay State Wind, a partnership between Danish energy developer Ørsted A/S and New England utility Eversource Energy, announced on Aug. 6 that the new plan reorganizes wind turbines in rows running east-to-west and incorporates one nautical mile between rows to allow fishing vessels more space to travel through, “keeping in mind the need to balance safe navigation, fishing concerns and clean energy production.” The updated turbine layout will be included in Bay State Wind’s construction and operations plan that it intends to submit to the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management by early 2019.

However, the commercial fishing industry is not satisfied with Bay State Wind’s changed layout. Meghan Lapp, fisheries liaison for Rhode Island-based frozen seafood producer Seafreeze Ltd., said one-mile-wide transit lanes can make it dangerous for trawl vessels to fish with their nets without hitting other boats or project infrastructure. Buffer zones for each side of a transit lane are also needed due to potential radar interference from the turbines.

“Unfortunately, developers only seem to do what is convenient for them at a low cost in response to fishing issues and concerns,” Lapp said. “The right step for a long-term working relationship between the fishing and wind industries is to address these and other commercial fishing concerns before we reach the stage of construction plans. Which is not being done in any meaningful way.”

Bonnie Brady, director of the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association, said the frustration with Bay State Wind’s project is not unfamiliar. She recalled similar issues with Deepwater Wind‘s Deepwater Offshore Wind Energy Center (South Fork Wind Farm) proposed off of Rhode Island, which has a turbine layout that would require fisheries to make detours that would add hours and costs to fishing trips.

Read the full story at S&P Global Market Intelligence

Geologists examine R.I. Sound seabed for wind turbines

August 6, 2018 –Before you can build a wind farm in the ocean, you have to understand what’s on and underneath the ocean floor.

The differences between sand, silt, rocks and clay will go a long way to determining what kind of foundations can be used to hold towering wind turbines above the water’s surface and how those foundations will be anchored to the bottom.

“That data is crucial to how we build a wind farm,” said Paul Murphy, vice president of operations and engineering at Deepwater Wind.

Deepwater is set to embark on a study that could last a month or more to determine the underwater geology of 256 square miles of Rhode Island Sound about 18 miles southeast of Block Island.

There, in waters that it’s leasing from the federal government, the Providence-based company plans to install dozens and dozens of wind turbines over the next decade to supply power to New York, Rhode Island and Connecticut.

A liftboat brought to Rhode Island from Louisiana and retrofitted with a drilling rig at the Quonset Business Park was set to depart Sunday for Deepwater’s lease area, where it will take core samples from deep within the ocean bottom.

Once it’s in place, the specialty ship named “Supporter” will lower three tubular legs to the seabed about 120 feet below and then raise itself up about 30 feet above the water to create a stable base for drilling to proceed.

The results of the survey will be used to supplement the construction and operations plans that Deepwater must submit for approval to the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the arm of the U.S. Department of the Interior that oversees all offshore energy.

Read the full story at the Providence Journal

NEW YORK: Young fishermen being driven from Long Island fishing industry

August 6, 2018 –A generation of young fishermen are being driven from the industry by an antiquated licensing system that makes it difficult if not impossible to transfer permits, fishermen said at one of several state meetings last week.

The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation has hired a consultant from Maine to meet with commercial fishermen across the metropolitan area over the next month to compile proposals for fixing the system.

Licenses for many fisheries are closed, due to the declining populations of species such as lobster, or because New York has only a limited portion of the coastal quota for thriving species such as black sea bass and fluke.

As a result, the only way younger fishermen can hope to access the fishery is if their parents die and they live in the same house as the previous license holder, or through one of the occasional lotteries held by the state for a handful of permits.

Read the full story at Newsday

Offshore Wind Is Likely The Next Big U.S. Renewable Sector

August 2, 2018 –At this moment, 30 megawatts of offshore wind turbines are sending power to Narraganset Electric, the National Grid affiliate serving Rhode Island. They are the only offshore turbines in operation in the U.S., a pittance considering Europe is closing in on 20,000 MW in operation.

But in the U.S. renewable sector, offshore wind is generating increasing excitement. Between dropping costs, ambitious state renewable targets, and a host of European developers looking to bring their knowledge stateside, the long-awaited U.S. offshore wind surge is now widely seen as imminent.

“The U.S. will certainly take advantage of the path already traveled by the EU offshore market and will be in a position to catch up in just a few years,” said Alejandro de Hoz, the vice president of U.S. offshore for Avangrid Renewables.

Offshore wind development is especially crucial in the Northeast. Blue states like New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts are looking to up their clean energy usage, which entails using wind and solar to power cities near the coast. But the abundant land needed for onshore wind and solar farms is difficult to find near population centers while piping power long distances is inefficient. Besides, New York has neither the wind resource of Texas nor the solar intensity of California.

Read the full story at Forbes

Fishermen up in arms over plan to build windmills off Long Island coast

August 1, 2018 — It’s before dawn on a recent July morning at Lazy Point in Napeague Bay, LI, and there is a slight chill in the air as the fishermen unload their boats into the water.

Dan Lester, a 12th-generation bayman, and his son Daniel, 14, are among those heading to sea to check their traps.

“This is the most sustainable fishing you’ll ever see,” Dan says as they begin hand-sorting the fish trapped in their nets, tossing whatever they can’t sell, including small spider crabs and stingrays, back into the ocean.

On a certain level, not much has changed for these New York baymen since the 1600s, when their ancestors came from places such as Kent, England, and were taught to fish by native Algonquin tribe members. But these East End fishermen fear it soon will.

They are up in arms over an agreement to build 15 massive windmills — each more than 650 feet tall, the height of Manhattan skyscrapers — off the coast of Montauk.

Read the full story at the New York Post

 

Sharks Are Creeping Into the Northeast Because of Climate Change

July 30, 2018 — Warmer waters are pushing the animals further north into previously shark-free waters. Should we be worried?

Shark Week, Discovery Channel’s annual homage to the ocean’s most infamous predator, comes to a close this weekend.

But residents of northeastern states like New York—long considered a relatively shark-free zone—might not have to wait until July 2019 to see more, as global warming has been linked with a significant northern shift in the habitats of most marine animals, including most sharks.

“There’s an astounding mass migration of animal life towards the poles,” Malin Pinsky, an associate professor in Rutgers’ Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Natural Resources, told The Daily Beast. In his work with spiny dogfish, a thin, small shark that lives along most of the East Coast, he’s seen their habitat shift “quite substantially.”

Pinsky isn’t the only scientist to make this observation. In April, researchers in North Carolina published a paper in Nature’s Scientific Resources that documented the northern migration of bull shark nurseries.

By analyzing data from North Carolina’s Division of Marine Fisheries (NCDMF), the researchers found that between 2003 and 2011, when water temperatures in the sound were hovering closer to 22 degrees Celsius, only six juvenile sharks were caught in the area. But as temperatures began to rise, a group of bull sharks migrated from their previous home in Northern Florida and established a nursery in Pamlico, causing a drastic uptick in juvenile shark presence. Between 2011 and 2016 alone, NCDMF found 53.

Read the full story at The Daily Beast

 

NEW YORK: Fluke Regs Still Problematic

July 27, 2018 –The current two-week closure of the commercial fluke fishery has once again drawn the ire of State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele, Jr. and State Senator Kenneth P. LaValle, who issued a joint statement last week calling for New York State to keep its promise to its commercial fishermen and immediately bring litigation to strike down the inequitable fluke quotas that continue to put a severe crimp on the economic viability of the state’s commercial industry.

On July 15, New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation announced that the fluke fishery would be closed in state waters until the end of the month and would then reopen with a harvest limit of 50 pounds per day.

In late 2017, Governor Cuomo promised to sue the federal government over the state’s low share of the East Coast fluke fishery. This spring, instead of bringing litigation, the state filed a petition with the United States Department of Commerce protesting the quota. The state has yet to hear back.

“These state-by-state quotas created by the Mid-Atlantic Fisheries Management Council and the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Marine Fisheries Service, pursuant to the Magnuson-Stevens Act, are based upon faulty and incomplete collection data, which discriminate against commercial fishermen in the State of New York,” Mr. Thiele said in a statement. “As a result of these discriminatory practices, New York’s quota for a number of species of black sea bass, bluefish, scup, and fluke are much lower than would be allocated under a fair non-discriminatory system. New York’s summer flounder quota was less than half of that allocated to Rhode Island, New Jersey, Virginia, and North Carolina.”

Read the full story at The East Hampton Star