Saving Seafood

North Atlantic Right Whale, Harbor Seals Focus of New Offshore Wind Studies

April 26, 2023 — State environmental officials and utility regulators announced last week their coordinated Offshore Wind Research and Monitoring Initiative requested an updated proposal for the deployment of “archival passive acoustic monitoring equipment to understand better the distribution and habitat space of the baleen whale species, including the endangered North Atlantic right whale,” off the coast.

RMI is administered by the N.J. Department of Environmental Protection and the Board of Public Utilities. In a joint statement April 19, officials said the updated request for proposal is part of a larger project that includes coordination with other state, regional and federal agencies looking to protect marine mammals as offshore wind lease areas develop on the Eastern Seaboard.

Read the full article at The Sand Paper

Panel: Climate change, not wind prep, is threat to whales

April 25, 2023 — Climate change, spurred by the burning of fossil fuels, is the biggest danger to marine life including whales, a panel of Democratic officials and environmental groups said Monday.

The gathering, held in an oceanfront conference room as a half-dozen dolphins frolicked in the ocean behind them, also strongly criticized a bill in the House of Representatives containing numerous incentives for oil and gas companies, and which eliminates several environmental protections currently in effect.

It also was a retort to opponents of offshore wind development, who claim that preparation for wind farms off New Jersey and New York are killing whales along the U.S. East Coast. Numerous federal and state agencies say there is no evidence that the deaths are related to offshore wind survey work.

The event came a week after U.S. Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. and other New Jersey Congressional Democrats wrote to the White House Council on Environmental Quality “demanding real solutions in response to the death of marine mammals off New Jersey’s coast.”

Read the full article at the Associated Press 

RHODE ISLAND: 4 hours not enough for vote on Revolution Wind proposal in R.I.

April 25, 2023 — People have a lot to say about the Revolution Wind offshore wind project proposal.

In fact, they have so much to say that even after a four-hour meeting Tuesday night, the Rhode Island Coastal Resources Management Council had to adjourn instead of voting on whether the agency should sign off on the proposal. The room in a Department of Administration building in Providence was only available until about 10 p.m., and as the clock neared that hour, the chair of the CRMC asked how many more people wanted to speak. At least a half-dozen hands shot up.

Instead of continuing to push it, the council set a new date: May 9. Public input will pick back up then.

CRMC had heard from the developer, from an advisory board for fishers who are concerned about the project and say more needs to be done to accommodate for the effects on their way of life, and then from members of the public on both sides of the divide before the meeting ended.

Revolution Wind would bring 400 megawatts of power to Rhode Island and 304 to Connecticut, the first utility-scale project to bring power directly to Rhode Island. Though it’s in federal waters, the CRMC has the authority to certify whether the project is consistent with its coastal policies, a crucial part of the regulatory process that will also have to go to the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.

The developers have proposed a nearly $13 million fund to compensate for potential effects on fishers, which could be boosted by as much as $5 million if the effects are worse than thought. If the effects are less than thought, the developer would recoup up to $2.5 million.

Advocates said the proposal is necessary as Rhode Island tries to confront climate change, while the Fishermen’s Advisory Board, an internal panel that advises the CRMC, asked for additional mitigation measures.

Read the full article at the Boston Globe

Comments to The Light: Intense reaction to wind/fishing investigation

April 25, 2023 — New Bedford Light readers reacted strongly to our investigation into offshore wind and what impacts it could have on the fishing industry, and to the opinion piece critical of the story.

Here’s what you had to say:

“Wind is renewable but turbines are not. They require massive amounts of fossil fuel to produce and the destruction of massive amounts of habitat. Climate change is a symptom of industrial development. So these machines will only compound the problem. Energy capturing devices kill wildlife and no amount of greenwashing can change that fact. Destroying the planet to save it makes no sense.”

— Carl van Warmerdam

“I’m sorry to say that this is a pretty weak story. There are many people here making dire claims — but I don’t see any evidence. This would be OK if this technology were new, but it most certainly is not. Britain and in particular Denmark, which has a large fishing fleet, has a lengthy offshore wind track record. Instead of just quoting lots of upset people, why not dig up the scientific evidence from those long-extant projects? Tell us what damage these turbines have done in salt water environments there, and then tell us how those projects will compare to what’s projected here. By now you should be presenting us with lots of evidence rather than just sowing the seeds of fear. Additionally, I’d like to know a lot of the data about offshore turbines and birds and bats. I was very surprised to know that there’s lots of evidence of bats out on some of these turbines. What’s going on there? If you’re gonna do a ProPublica thing, you need to dig a couple of layers deeper here.”

— Wendy Williams

“The cod are gone, fished to the point of collapse. The water is warming and lobsters have moved out. Sea level rise threatens our shores and cities. It is either stop burning carbon or render large areas of the planet uninhabitable. Wind turbines offer a path to that goal. We need to do this.”

— William Trimble

“Offshore wind is a boondoggle that will only benefit government fat cats, China and a few investors. It will NEVER produce significant steady reliable electrical power. The power can’t be stored, it will require rapid start/stop backup power to compensate for when the wind does not blow, the equipment has an at best 10-15 year working life cycle and can’t be recycled effectively. The impacts on the biosphere near it (air currents and temperatures, ocean currents and temperatures, sediments, nutrients, electromagnetic fields near turbines and cables, bottom ecosystem damage, etc) will be immense to $500+ million fisheries. Also it requires rare earth minerals that are NOT sustainably and fairly harvested.”

 — Andy Carr

Read the full article at the New Bedford Light

Biden admin is rushing to industrialize US oceans to stop climate change: ‘Environmental wrecking ball’

April 25, 2023 — The Biden administration is pushing full steam ahead to massively expand offshore wind development across millions of acres of federal waters, actions that critics warn would have dire ecological and economic impacts.

Days after taking office, President Biden issued an executive action ordering his administration to expand opportunities for the offshore wind industry as part of his aggressive climate agenda to curb greenhouse gas emissions and stop global warming. Months later, he outlined goals to deploy 30 gigawatts of offshore wind energy by 2030, the most ambitious goal of its kind worldwide.

“Two years ago, President Biden issued a bold challenge to move America towards a clean energy future,” Deb Haaland, the secretary of the Department of the Interior (DOI), said earlier this month. “The Interior Department answered that call and is moving rapidly to create a robust and sustainable clean energy economy with good-paying union jobs.”

In May 2021, the DOI’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) approved the 800-megawatt Vineyard Wind project 12 miles off the coast of Massachusetts, marking the first ever large-scale offshore wind approval. Then, in November 2021, the agency approved the 130-megawatt Southfork Wind project off the coast of Long Island, New York, the second commercial-scale offshore project.

Read the full article at Fox News

In the Race for Clean Energy, Is Offshore Wind Harming the Nation’s Fisheries?

April 25, 2023 — Tom Hafer remembers the first time the fish stopped biting. It was a little over 20 years ago when fiber optic cables were being installed in waters off the coast of central California, where he fishes commercially for spot prawns and rockfish. The fishing was disrupted for “miles and miles,” says Hafer, who has been fishing since the 1970s.

Now, he and many other fishermen are bracing themselves for what could be a much larger threat looming in the water. Offshore wind farms, which are ramping up in the United States, could come at a tremendous cost to fishermen as they are being sited in prime fishing areas. And the process of erecting wind farms and their long-term presence in the water could alter aquatic ecosystems, potentially driving away fish and marine mammals.

Some fishing communities also believe the physical infrastructure of offshore wind farms may pose a danger to fishing vessels and gear and the people who earn a livelihood from the sea.

There is little science to assuage those concerns. The floating wind farms being proposed along the West Coast rely on technologies that haven’t yet been commercially deployed. And the federal agency tasked with siting new farms—the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM)—is new to the task.

Conceived in response to the BP oil spill in 2010, BOEM’s original charge was to oversee offshore oil in lieu of the former Minerals Management Service. BOEM has little experience with offshore wind and, so far, has been criticized for lack of thoroughness in vetting potential fishery conflicts.

Conflicts have also surfaced between BOEM and the nation’s top fisheries agency, NOAA Fisheries, as NOAA advises the agency in addressing concerns about fish health in an electrified sea. Recent reporting by ProPublica and The New Bedford Light has also raised concerns about relationships between the offshore wind industry and at least 90 of its regulators, including the Deputy Secretary of the Department of the Interior.

Offshore wind is a relatively new phenomenon in U.S. waters—the first commercial wind farm at sea was completed in 2016. That facility, Block Island Wind Farm, consists of five turbines off the coast of Rhode Island and is capable of producing 29 megawatts of power. That’s more than enough to supply all 17,000 homes on nearby Block Island, according to Ørsted, the Danish power company that acquired the installation in 2018.

But Block Island is a small fry compared to what’s coming, and that’s what has some critics worried. In 2021, the Biden administration set forth a lofty goal: By the end of the decade, it wants offshore wind farms to be producing 30 gigawatts of renewable energy in U.S. waters. Right now, Block Island and the two-turbine Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind pilot project are the only two commercial-scale facilities that have been completed, and together they’re capable of generating just 0.042 gigawatts, less than 1 percent of the Biden administration’s goal.

Read the full article at Civil Eats

Top officials warned Biden admin about dangers wind energy projects pose to fishing industry, letter shows

April 25, 2023 — The executive directors of three federally established fishery councils along the East Coast expressed concern last year about the threats posed by offshore wind energy projects.

In an Aug. 22 letter to former Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) Director Amanda Lefton, the three officials — who respectively lead the New England, Mid-Atlantic and South Atlantic Fishery Management Councils — expressed concern about current processes for approving offshore wind development. They also made a series of recommendations to help the federal government mitigate impacts on fisheries.

“As we have stated in several past comment letters to BOEM, we are very concerned about the cumulative impacts of multiple wind energy projects on the fisheries we manage,” they stated in the letter. “The multiple wind energy projects planned along the east coast will have cumulative and compounding effects on our fisheries.”

“The synergistic effects of multiple projects may be more than additive and this may not be sufficiently identified in project-specific documents; therefore, losses may be undercompensated by taking a project-by-project approach,” they continued.

Read the full article at Fox News

New report highlights fisheries concerns over offshore wind development

April 23, 2023 — The fisheries have concerns about the rapid development of offshore wind farms and what remains unknown about how fish will be affected by wind energy technology.

A new report on the intersection of the fisheries and offshore wind from the Responsible Offshore Development Alliance (RODA) outlined some of the concerns.

Fiona Hogan is RODA’s Research Director and the paper’s lead author.

The report highlights uncertainty about the noise produced from wind turbines. Hogan said it’s still not clear how fish will react.

“We’re not sure what the overall net impact of the full build-out across these areas will have in terms of noise output and how fish species might respond to that directly,” she said.

The question of whether fish could change location because of offshore wind development came from another problem included in the paper.

Read the full article at CapeCod.com

NEW JERSEY: Whales keep dying: We asked NJ offshore wind companies to explain what they’re doing

April 23, 2023 — At least 40 whale and dolphin strandings have been reported along the New Jersey-New York coastline since December.

Dozens of Jersey Shore mayors, lawmakers and a handful of advocates have a sinking suspicion that offshore wind activity is to blame. They point to the sound technology used by offshore wind developers to map the ocean floor. Military sonar technology was once blamed for the deaths of whales found with bleeding ears in the Caribbean more than 20 years ago. But what about today?

In an effort to get to the bottom of this ocean mystery, New Jersey 101.5 spoke to the research group that examined the dead mammals as well as to representatives of two companies that are developing the offshore wind projects. Their answers shed light on what kind of injuries the mammals have sustained and what kind of technology and activities the offshore wind developers are employing off the coast of New Jersey. But the question remains: What’s causing these deaths?

Whale death numbers rise dramatically

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has been tracking what they call an Unusual Mortality Event among humpback whales since 2016. This is a term given to a “significant die-off of any marine mammal population.”

But even amid the high number of strandings over the last seven years, 2023 is a standout year. The previous year-high was five in 2019. Less than five months into 2023, seven humpback whale strandings have already been recorded in New Jersey, according to NOAA. There were four in the state last year and at least two of those occurred in December 2022.

Read the full article at New Jersey 101.5

After whale strandings, New Jersey to fund more offshore wind impact studies

April 21, 2023 — New Jersey state officials say they are directing almost $2 million more toward studying environmental impacts of offshore wind power. New projects will monitor whales and harbor seals near wind energy projects off Atlantic City.

The announcement comes after months when Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy’s administration has been beset by pressure from offshore wind project critics and Republican legislators over a series of whale and dolphin strandings on New Jersey beaches.

The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection and New Jersey Board of Public Utilities will also pitch in $100,000 to join the Responsible Offshore Science Alliance, a nonprofit organization that has fishing industry groups, federal and state agencies and wind power developers working together on environmental studies.

The newly announced projects will be funded through New Jersey’s existing Offshore Wind Research & Monitoring Initiative. Topping the list is deployment of a new whale detection buoy off Atlantic City.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman