Saving Seafood

South Fork wind farms reduce turbines, but fisheries groups have “serious concerns”

June 10, 2021 — The developers of the offshore wind farm, which will power South Fork, agreed to reduce the number of turbines in the LIPA contracted project from 15 to 12, but Road Island fishermen said turbines. The reduction was useless and provided a $ 12 million compensation package. Insufficient packaging.

Orsted and Eversource are partners in more than $ 2 billion of projects to be built off the coast of Rhode Island and Massachusetts by 2023, and are considering whether to issue a permit for the project. Prior to the Coastal Commission, we announced the changes last week.

In a statement, the two companies said they would “move forward by reducing the total number of turbines in the project from 15 to 12” while providing compensation packages to Rhode Island fishermen. If $ 12 million is accepted, the two companies will move forward. In particular, it will compensate for the loss of income of those who have been banned from fishing due to the construction and installation of turbines.

Read the full story at the Florida News Times

NC Gov. Cooper Sets Ambitious Goal For Offshore Wind Energy By 2040

June 10, 2021 — Gov. Roy Cooper has set ambitious goals for wind energy off the North Carolina coast over the next two decades as part of his plan to fight climate change by shifting away from fossil fuels.

The governor on Wednesday signed Executive Order No. 218, which calls for developing 2.8 gigawatts of offshore wind energy by 2030 and 8 gigawatts by 2040. If that happens, the governor said that would power 2.3 million homes by 2040.

The order also calls for a new task force, “NC TOWERS, for “N.C. Taskforce for Offshore Wind Economic Resource Strategies.” Its job would be to advise offshore wind projects.

The state currently has no offshore wind farms and only one major land-based wind project — the 208-megawatt wind farm Avangrid Renewables built for Amazon in Pasquotank and Perquimans counties in eastern North Carolina. Avangrid is also studying a potential 200-square-mile wind farm 27 miles off Kitty Hawk, on the Outer Banks.

Wednesday’s order is designed to help speed up Cooper’s 2018 Executive Order No. 80. That order and the governor’s Clean Energy Plan called for developing wind energy as one way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and shift the state to what the governor calls a “clean energy economy.”

Read the full story at KFAE

U.S. explores wind energy potential in Gulf of Mexico

June 9, 2021 — The Biden administration on Tuesday said it will explore the potential of offshore wind energy development in the Gulf of Mexico, part of its goal to supercharge growth in clean energy over the next decade.

“This is an important first step to see what role the Gulf may play in this exciting frontier,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said in a statement.

While the Gulf of Mexico is a major hub for offshore oil and gas production, it has had little renewable energy development. President Joe Biden has made the expansion of clean energy, especially offshore wind, a cornerstone of his fight against climate change.

Biden faces criticism in Gulf Coast states after putting a pause on federal drilling auctions. States including Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi and Alabama sued in March to restore the sales, which are on hold pending a government review.

The Department of Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) will publish a Request for Interest (RFI) on June 11 to see if there is any interest in offshore wind development in the Outer Continental Shelf.

Read the full story at Reuters

Interior Dept. gauging interest in Gulf of Mexico wind power

June 9, 2021 — President Joe Biden’s administration wants to know whether offshore wind companies want to move into the Gulf of Mexico.

The agency that oversees offshore leases will publish a request for interest Friday in the Federal Register, for areas off Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi and Alabama, the Interior Department said Tuesday.

Those areas are largely in shallower waters where many wells have played out rather than the deep seas where the Gulf’s offshore oil and gas industry is now focused.

Biden has said he wants enough wind-generated electricity for more than 10 million homes nationwide by 2030.

Offshore wind development has the potential to create tens of thousands of good-paying, union jobs across the nation, said Interior Secretary Deb Haaland.

Her agency’s request for interest from developers “is an important first step to see what role the Gulf may play in this exciting frontier,” she said.

“The Gulf of Mexico is extremely well-positioned for the exploration of new offshore technologies and energy opportunities,” said Erik Milito, president of the National Ocean Industries Association, which includes companies building both wind and oil and gas facilities offshore.

Read the full story at the Associated Press

Offshore Wind Farms Show What Biden’s Climate Plan Is Up Against

June 7, 2021 — A constellation of 5,400 offshore wind turbines meet a growing portion of Europe’s energy needs. The United States has exactly seven.

With more than 90,000 miles of coastline, the country has plenty of places to plunk down turbines. But legal, environmental and economic obstacles and even vanity have stood in the way.

President Biden wants to catch up fast — in fact, his targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions depend on that happening. Yet problems abound, including a shortage of boats big enough to haul the huge equipment to sea, fishermen worried about their livelihoods and wealthy people who fear that the turbines will mar the pristine views from their waterfront mansions. There’s even a century-old, politically fraught federal law, known as the Jones Act, that blocks wind farm developers from using American ports to launch foreign construction vessels.

Annie Hawkins, executive director of the Responsible Offshore Development Alliance, which includes hundreds of fishing groups and companies, worries that the government is failing to scrutinize proposals and adequately plan.

“What they’re doing is saying, ‘Let’s take this thing we’ve really never done here, go all in, objectors be damned,’” Ms. Hawkins said. “Coming from a fisheries perspective, we know there is going to be a massive-scale displacement. You can’t just go fish somewhere else.”

Fishing groups point to recent problems in Europe to justify their concerns. Orsted, the world’s largest offshore wind developer, for example, has sought a court injunction to keep fishermen and their equipment out of an area of the North Sea set for new turbines while it studies the area.

Orsted said that it had tried to “work collaboratively with fishermen” but that it had sought the order because its work was complicated by gear left in the area by a fisherman it could not identify. “To safely conduct the survey work and only as a last resort, we were left with no choice but to secure the right to remove this gear,” the company said in a statement.

When developers first applied in 2001 for a permit for Cape Wind, a project between Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, resistance was fierce. Opponents included Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat who died in 2009, and William I. Koch, an industrialist.

Read the full story at The New York Times

Expanding Wind Power While Killing Fewer Migratory Birds Is Biden’s Quandary

June 7, 2021 — President Biden has taken steps to restore criminal penalties for accidental killing of migratory birds, a move that if adopted as expected later this year would add pressure to wind power developers who are working to fulfill his mandate to boost wind-farm developments as sources of clean energy.

Wind turbines—some with 200-foot blades spinning up to 180 mph—are estimated to kill between 140,000 and 500,000 birds a year through accidental collisions, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The wide variation in the estimate reflects the difficulty in tracking bird deaths, but whatever the toll, it is expected to rise as more wind turbines are built. Wildlife researchers in 2013 estimated that the Energy Department’s 2008 wind-power target would push bird deaths to about 1.4 million annually. That figure hasn’t been updated to reflect the Biden administration’s plans to expand offshore wind farms.

Wind turbines are far from the biggest hazard to birds; nearly 600 million birds die each year from crashing into windows, based on a median estimate by Fish and Wildlife.

Read the full story at the The Wall Street Journal

MASSACHUSETTS: Baker, guvs urge Biden to keep offshore wind a priority

June 7, 2021 — Gov. Charlie Baker and governors from eight other states poised to benefit environmentally and economically from the emerging offshore wind sector sent President Joe Biden a letter on Friday outlining their thoughts and recommendations for keeping the momentum going in the fledgling field.

Biden’s administration has moved quickly to advance offshore wind projects, namely the Vineyard Wind I project that last month got the federal go-ahead it had been waiting about two years to receive, and Baker’s administration has cheered the president’s swift action.

Vineyard Wind, which is expected to deliver 800 megawatts of wind-generated power to Massachusetts by 2023, is on track to be the first utility-scale offshore wind farm in the United States. Mayflower Wind, an 804-MW project, is also under contract to deliver power to Massachusetts. And an upcoming state solicitation seeks a project of up to 1,600 MW that can come online by the end of the decade.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

New Jersey’s 2nd Offshore Wind Project Expected to Be Approved June 24

June 7, 2021 — New Jersey is expected to approve up to 2,400 megawatts of offshore wind energy at a June 24 meeting of the state’s Board of Public Utilities, which would set the stage for hundreds of wind turbines off the Garden State coast in coming years.

The approval would add to the 1,100 megawatts already given the green light by New Jersey’s BPU, and keep the state on pace for Gov. Phil Murphy’s aggressive goal of 7,500 megawatts by 2035. That’s enough to power half of the state’s 1.5 million homes.

The first award in 2019 went to Ørsted and its Ocean Wind 1 project, which is planning 92 turbines off Cape May and southern New Jersey to produce the 1,100 megawatts. The wind farm is currently second in the federal government’s queue of offshore wind projects under review following the Biden administration’s approval in May of the Vineyard farm off Massachusetts. Ocean Wind’s federal approval is expected by June 2023.

New Jersey’s current evaluation of bids is a two-horse race that includes Ørsted and it’s Ocean Wind 2 bid, and a developer called Atlantic Shores, which owns a 183,000-acre lease area off the coast of Atlantic City and Long Beach Island. Atlantic Shores is a joint venture between Shell New Energies US and EDF Renewables North America.

Read the full story at NBC Philadelphia

D.C. Circuit Affirms that Offshore Wind Lease Does Not Trigger NEPA Review

June 4, 2021 — The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) does not need to conduct full environmental reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) when granting an offshore wind farm lease, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals has affirmed. The decision followed a lawsuit by commercial fishing organizations and seaside municipalities who claimed that BOEM violated NEPA and the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA) when it auctioned an offshore lease to Equinor (formerly Statoil) without performing an environmental review of the anticipated windfarm project. The decision puts to rest the question of whether a mere lease sale may trigger extensive environmental review under NEPA, potentially streamlining the initial lease acquisition process, but also requiring the investment of significant funds before developers have cleared environmental review.

In Fisheries Survival Fund, et al. v. Sally Jewell, et al.,1 plaintiffs challenged BOEM’s issuance of the lease, arguing that it violated NEPA because it failed to analyze the environmental impacts of constructing and operating a wind energy facility. Leases for offshore energy projects proceed under different processes depending on whether BOEM or the developer proposes an area for lease. Either way, BOEM must consult with state task forces, other state and local representatives, and with representatives of Indian Tribes whose interests may be affected. Before issuing a lease, BOEM follows a four-step process, issuing a Call for Information and Nominations, completing the Area Identification process, publishing a Proposed Sale Notice, and publishing a Final Sale Notice.

Here, BOEM published an environmental assessment at the same time it published the Proposed Sale Notice for the wind energy lease at issue. The environmental assessment found that the reasonably foreseeable impacts of the lease sale would not significantly impact the environment. Plaintiffs argued that that more extensive environmental review was required, not just of the lease itself but of the full impacts of the anticipated wind farm, alleging that BOEM violated NEPA by failing to perform this more extensive review. BOEM maintained throughout the litigation that additional analysis and environmental review under NEPA was not required until Equinor conducted a site assessment and proposed a construction and operations plan for the wind energy facility.

Read the full story at The National Law Review