Saving Seafood

MASSACHUSETTS: It Was Supposed to Be a Lifeline for a Blue-Collar Town. Then Trump Returned.

June 1, 2026 — The dock that launched U.S. offshore wind is mostly empty now. The 200-foot-tall tower pieces that loomed like skyscrapers over a harbor of fishing trawlers are gone. So too are the house-sized gearboxes and turbine blades stretching the length of a soccer field.

The big turbine parts were supposed to represent a new era in a city where fish houses and abandoned factories line the waterfront. They were assembled here, sent out to sea and installed as part of Vineyard Wind, the largest renewable energy project built to-date east of the Mississippi River. All that was left on a recent April day were empty blade racks, a pair of red cranes and three broken blades.

It wasn’t supposed to look like this.

Vineyard Wind was supposed to be the first of many. Instead, it may be the only offshore wind project ever built in New Bedford.

This city of Portuguese, Latino and Cape Verdean residents is ground zero for America’s offshore wind industry, a test case of whether a blue collar fishing town can forge a new economic future by raising massive turbines out at sea.

Read the full article at Politico

House spending plan slaps hefty inspection fees on offshore wind projects

May 29, 2026 — The House Republican spending bill for the Interior Department contains another potential punch for the beleaguered offshore wind industry: big new fees.

The fiscal 2027 Interior-Environment spending bill, which a House Appropriations subcommittee advanced last week, would impose a range of fees on offshore wind projects. Those are broken into annual fees and physical inspection fees.

Annual fees would be $7,300 for an onshore inspection visit to an offshore wind project’s control center and $15,400 for a visual inspection of a wind turbine. Further physical inspections of a wind turbine or substation would cost $72,800.

The new fees largely reflect the White House’s proposed budget for Interior, released in March. The fees could amount to much more than is paid by offshore oil companies for inspections, given that the language calls for per-turbine inspections and wind farms include many turbines: 62 for the newly running Vineyard Wind project off Massachusetts and more than 170 anticipated for a project under construction off the coast of Virginia.

“This appears as another direct effort to constrain the offshore wind industry,” said Timothy Fox, managing director of ClearView Energy Partners, in an email. “The Trump Administration has already significantly constrained proposed offshore wind projects and may hope the inspection fees undermine the viability of projects already in service.”

Inspection fees and other similar charges are common in the energy sector, and wind industry players have long expected a fee schedule was in the offing. Offshore wind did not take off in the U.S. until the Biden administration, with several projects under construction right now along the East Coast. Vineyard Wind finished construction in March and is working to bring all of its turbines online, while Revolution Wind off the coast of Rhode Island has nearly installed all of its 65 turbines and has begun to send power to the grid.

But the Trump administration has hammered wind energy by canceling leases, trying to block projects currently being built and paying companies to abandon their plans.

Read the full article at E&E News

CALIFORNIA: Are California’s lofty offshore wind power ambitions on the rocks?

May 26, 2026 — California is counting on the growth of offshore wind generation to help the state meet its ambitious goal to derive 100% of its electricity from carbon-free sources by 2045 or earlier.

But late last month, state energy officials and offshore-wind advocates were blindsided after learning one developer abruptly withdrew plans to build a big wind farm in Morro Bay, after striking a controversial deal with the Trump administration.

It came “totally out of the blue,” said Matt Baker, one of the five voting members of the California Public Utilities Commission, “and it’s amazing the lengths that the administration is going towards trying to make this important source of energy off-limits, both to California and the rest of the country.”

Baker was one of the panelists this past week in Long Beach at the Pacific Offshore Wind Summit, a meeting of policymakers, businesses, port authorities, environmental groups and others supporting the Golden State reaping the anticipated energy bonanza blowing off its coast.

The title of this year’s convention was telling: Staying The Course on California Offshore Wind. And state energy officials insist they can ride out the storm.

Read the full article at the Miami Herald

MASSACHUSETTS: Port cities try to weather shifting winds

May 21, 2026 — Forty-Two Acres of vacant industrial land — a patchwork of asphalt, weeds, and grass — sit waiting in Salem’s harbor. In the center is a coal power plant, shut down in 2014 after a decade of community activism, and a natural gas plant, retired in 2018. The city identified the lot, roughly 30 football fields in size, to be the site for Salem’s offshore wind terminal, which would be the third in the state after the New Bedford Marine Commerce Terminal opened in 2015 and the city began its phased opening of the Foss Marine Terminal in 2023.

But strong political winds have, at least for now, changed the course for Salem.

For the city’s climate advocates, the prospective terminal represents decades of work toward a cleaner, renewable energy future, one that the state has been putting money and policy behind for years and that has promised to bring thousands of jobs and other community investments. Salem and New Bedford both received millions from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center (MassCEC) to develop the sites of retired fossil fuel power plants into terminals that would serve as logistics and operations centers for the construction of offshore wind. But wind projects have long been struggling to get off the ground. During the Biden administration, global supply chain disruption, climbing inflation, and high interest rates drove up costs for developers. The Trump administration’s anti-wind actions — issuing executive orders that block new projects, pausing existing leases, and rescinding grants — drove both cities further from the economic boon they expected.

In New Bedford, the influx of tenants that was hoped for never materialized. In Salem, the plan was to build two berths to receive ships carrying crew and materials for wind projects. But construction is stalled and there’s no start date in sight.

“We expected a lot of jobs, like a lot of life-changing … career sustainable jobs that were going to come from this, and that’s what hasn’t materialized,” said Sam Lambert, deputy chapter director for the Sierra Club’s Massachusetts’ chapter, of the Salem terminal and the offshore wind projects it might have supported.

In New Bedford, the terminal has had to shift its vision. It’s leaning on general cargo and marine construction for additional revenue.

“We were operating under a plan where, when the first [wind farm] gets first electricity, it would start doing its operation and maintenance work out of our facility,” said Andrew Saunders, president of the New Bedford Foss Marine Terminal. But with the current political climate, “the terminal has had to pivot in order to generate revenue, and figure out something of a different identity.”

Read the full article at Commonwealth Beacon

Marine life finds new home at base of wind turbines

May 14, 2026 — As lobsters migrate to colder waters due to climate change, Jonah crabs are becoming one of the most important species for fisheries in Southern New England.

“As the biomass of the American lobster declines due to climate-related changes and shifting ocean conditions, many fishermen have adapted by targeting other valuable species, and the Jonah crab has become a major alternative,” said Emmanuel Oyewole, a first-year Ph.D. student in the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography. “The Jonah crab used to be considered a bycatch species and thrown back because lobster was so lucrative. As lobsters became less abundant, people started to realize that the Jonah crab is a viable and delicious alternative.”

Oyewole is conducting a study that is partly funded by a grant from The Nature Conservancy into how offshore wind farm structures are impacting the growth and habitats of Jonah crabs.

“Ecologically, Jonah crabs also play an important role in the marine food web,” said Oyewole, who is from Ilé-Ifẹ̀, Nigeria, a town in the southwestern part of the country. “They are both predators and prey, helping to maintain balance within benthic ecosystems. Because they are closely connected to seafloor habitats, they can help us understand how offshore wind farm structures may influence local biodiversity, habitat use, and the productivity of fisheries.”

When turbine foundations are installed on the seafloor, their hard surfaces become desirable habitats for marine organisms to attach, grow, and live, just as they do on natural rock or reefs. As algae, barnacles, mussels, and other small marine life, settle on these structures, these smaller organisms attract larger species such as crabs and fish that come to feed, hide, or seek shelter.

Read the full article at the University of Rhode Island

MASSACHUSETTS: Nearly Two Years Later, Broken Blade Investigation Continues

May 7, 2026 — As Vineyard Wind and its turbine manufacturer duke it out in court over hundreds of millions owed to both parties, a federal investigation into what caused the blade failure at the heart of the case remains ongoing nearly two years later.

Last month a Massachusetts superior court judge issued a preliminary injunction that prevented GE Vernova, the company that built and installed several dozen faulty turbine blades at the offshore wind energy project off Martha’s Vineyard, from walking away from its work at the wind farm.

The case hinges on contract language related to who owes who money. GE Vernova said it wanted to exit from its contracts because it was owed more than $300 million. Vineyard Wind said that it didn’t have to pay any money to GE, because the GE owed Vineyard Wind nearly $800 million because of the delays from the shoddy work.

While that continues to play out in court, the long-awaited investigation into the 2024 blade break at Vineyard Wind by the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, the agency that oversees offshore energy production, continues on with no clear end date.

The bureau itself has been tight-lipped and declined to give a progress report on its work and any of the environmental monitoring that the bureau required of Vineyard Wind.

Read the full article at Vineyard Gazzette

VIRGINIA: Dominion to open nation’s biggest offshore wind farm next year

May 4, 2026 — The largest offshore wind project under construction in the U.S. has nine turbines in the water and is on track to begin operating next year.

The update by Dominion Energy on its sprawling project called Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind came as the utility reported strong growth in power demand from data centers. Company executives also expressed enthusiasm in Virginia’s new energy storage targets and said the utility had submitted a bid to extend a long-term power contract for its nuclear power plant in Connecticut.

But the offshore wind project headlined Dominion’s financial update with analysts Friday. The Trump administration temporarily halted construction of the 2,600-megawatt project late last year. Construction resumed in January after Dominion successfully sued the government. The project’s first turbine began spinning in March.

Read the full article at E&E News

Court Says Sunrise Wind Can Resume

May 4, 2026 — President Trump’s effort to kill the nascent offshore wind industry is starting to resemble his fruitless effort to overturn his re-election loss in 2020, as a federal judge on Monday handed him a fifth consecutive loss in court challenges to the administration’s December order pausing construction of five wind farms along the East Coast.

The United States District Court for the District of Columbia granted the preliminary injunction sought by Sunrise Wind L.L.C., regarding the suspension order issued by the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. The move allows the construction of Sunrise Wind in federal waters about 30 miles east of Montauk Point to resume immediately while the underlying lawsuit challenging the administration’s order progresses.

The 924-megawatt wind farm’s export cable is to make landfall at Smith Point County Park in Shirley and is to generate electricity sufficient to power nearly 600,000 residences.

“Sunrise Wind will determine how it may be possible to work with the U.S. administration to achieve an expeditious and durable resolution,” a statement from Orsted, the developer, reads. “With safety as the top priority, the project will resume impacted construction work as soon as possible to deliver affordable, reliable power to the State of New York.”

Read the full article at the East Hampton Star

Trump pays more offshore wind farm developers to switch to fossil fuel production

May 1, 2026 — Despite his struggles with the courts, U.S. President Donald Trump is continuing his push to block offshore wind power development with all the tools at his disposal – including buying out the developers.

Trump has made blocking offshore wind projects a priority during his second term, immediately issuing an executive order pausing federal approval of wind projects on the Outer Continental Shelf after resuming office in January 2025. He followed up that order by issuing stop work orders for two of the larger wind farms developments on the East Coast, although those orders were ultimately rescinded.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Trump administration to pay 2 more companies to walk away from US offshore wind leases

April 28, 2026 — The Trump administration announced two more payouts Monday for energy companies to walk away from U.S. offshore wind projects under development.

Bluepoint Wind and Golden State Wind have agreed to end their offshore wind leases in exchange for reimbursements totaling nearly $900 million. Both companies have decided not to pursue any new offshore wind projects in the United States, the Interior Department announced Monday.

Bluepoint Wind is an offshore wind project in the early stages of development off the coasts of New Jersey and New York, while Golden State Wind is a floating offshore wind project proposed off California’s central coast.

Interior said it’s following the model of its recent deal with the French energy company TotalEnergies, which is getting a $1 billion payout to walk away from projects off the coasts of North Carolina and New York. TotalEnergies agreed in March to what’s essentially a refund of its leases, and will invest the money in fossil fuel projects instead.

Read the full article at the Associated Press