Saving Seafood

Fisheries Survival Fund: Change Wind Energy Areas to Protect Scallops

June 11, 2021 — The following was released by the Fisheries Survival Fund:

The Fisheries Survival Fund (FSF), representing the vast majority of the limited access Atlantic scallop fishery, is calling for the federal government to change its proposed lease sale boundaries for wind farms off the coast of New York to better protect the region’s fisheries from harmful development. These changes are necessary because the government’s current proposed lease sales, announced today, fail to incorporate any of the recommendations made by FSF or the city of New Bedford, the nation’s most valuable fishing port.

The sea scallop fishery is one of the most valuable in the country: in 2019, commercial landings totaled more than 60.6 million pounds, valued at approximately $570 million. In the New York Call Areas alone, there were $268 million worth of scallops landed over a five year period, from 2012-2016. Atlantic sea scallops are, in fact, the nation’s most valuable federally managed fishery.

FSF is requesting that the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), which is responsible for leasing areas for offshore development, incrementally change its lease plans for the New York Bight. Currently, two BOEM Wind Energy Areas (WEAs), Hudson South and Central Bight, are located in particularly sensitive areas for scallops. In their current form, these areas, including hundreds of thousands of acres of ocean, will have a serious negative impact on the fishery.

BOEM’s proposed eastern-most lease areas in Hudson South are directly adjacent to the Hudson Canyon Scallop Access Area (“Hudson Canyon SAA”). The Hudson Canyon SAA is one of the most important scallop grounds in the Northeast. From 2001-2018, over 60 million pounds of scallops, valued at well over $600 million, were harvested directly from the area. Further, a recently published paper principally authored by the lead federal scallop scientist concluded that successful management of the Hudson Canyon SAA resulted in a sevenfold increase in scallops in the nearby Elephant Trunk Scallop Access Area, and benefited scallops in the Delmarva Scallop Access Area.

Altogether, the Hudson Canyon SAA has been worth well over a billion dollars directly to the scallop fishery in the past two decades, not to mention the multiplied indirect community economic benefits of these fishery landings. The Hudson Canyon SAA’s ecological and economic benefits explain why FSF has requested that BOEM operate under the well-recognized “precautionary principle” to create a buffer between wind farms in the Hudson South and this critical scallop area.

The Central Bight is in the middle of prime, historic scallop habitat, and represents tens of millions of dollars of scallop catches over the past decade. Leasing of the Central Bight should be delayed, just as BOEM delayed, for view-shed reasons, leasing of the two Fairways lease areas in the northern New York Bight.

Read the full release here

Biden eyes Gulf of Mexico for wind energy opportunities

June 10, 2021 — Fresh off announcing its intent to explore wind energy initiatives on the U.S. West Coast, the Biden administration is now looking for opportunities to do the same in the Gulf of Mexico.

On Tuesday, 8 June, the U.S. Department of the Interior announced it would release a request-for-information (RFI) solicitation to determine if there’s interest in employing wind technology off the coasts of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Online sessions to discuss Louisiana’s future in wind energy

June 10, 2021 — Online sessions will take a closer look at how offshore wind energy could become part of Louisiana’s future.

Gov. John Bel Edwards announced Wednesday, June 9, that the Governor’s office and the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, Louisiana Economic Development and the Department of Natural Resources will host Louisiana Wind Week 2021 from June 21-25.

“While Louisiana’s onshore wind resources are limited, Louisiana’s coast is ripe for wind energy development,” said Gov. Edwards. “Thanks to years of oil and gas exploration experience, Louisiana’s existing infrastructure, workforce and business community give us a strategic advantage in developing offshore wind in the Gulf of Mexico and all coastal waters of the United States.”

The state says that many Louisiana companies have already leveraged their experience to help design, fabricate and install the nation’s first commercial offshore wind farm at the Block Island project off the coast of Rhode Island.

Read the full story at KATC

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