Saving Seafood

RHODE ISLAND: CRMC approves key SouthCoast Wind permit over objections from fishing industry

June 11, 2026 — The murky future for SouthCoast Wind gained a small but significant sign of clarity Tuesday with a key permit approval from the Rhode Island Coastal Resources Management Council (CRMC).

The panel’s unanimous vote — the first decision made by the newly retooled council —- followed a four-hour series of expert presentations and public comments on the impacts of the underwater cable lines in Rhode Island waters. The center of the project — 141 turbines generating more than 1,200 megawatts of wind-powered electricity at nameplate capacity — sits more than 60 miles south of Rhode Island’s coastline, closer to Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. But project developers needed permission from Ocean State regulators to run power lines from the turbines to the electric grid, snaking up the Sakonnet River, underneath Island Park in Portsmouth and out Mount Hope Bay to reach land at Brayton Point in Somerset, Massachusetts.

When and whether the high-voltage cables ever come through Rhode Island remains unclear; SouthCoast is one of many offshore wind projects facing unforeseen setbacks since President Donald Trump took office in January 2026. The developer hasn’t lined up a buyer for its product, though Massachusetts power providers are expected to announce a decision on a potential deal by the end of the month. Rhode Island Energy was initially interested in procuring a small piece of the project power, too, but broke off contract negotiations after multiple delays, citing federal policy uncertainty.

Federal regulators with the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management have also revoked a key federal permit tied to the project and are still reviewing whether to reissue the permit with new conditions — if at all.

Fishermen, municipalities and conservative-funded interest groups noted the federal uncertainty in 90 pages of opposition letters to coastal regulators. Far more pressing for critics, however, was the potential environmental harms to native species and habitats where the developer wants to drill and bury the power lines, and the commercial and recreational fishing community that depends on those habitats.

Read the full article at the News From the States

Global offshore wind capacity set to grow to 420 GW by end of 2035, GWEC report says

June 9, 2026 — Global offshore wind capacity is set to quadruple over the next decade to reach ​420 gigawatts (GW) by the end of 2035, ‌a report by the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) showed on Tuesday.

  • Around 92 GW of offshore wind was installed by ​the end of 2025, enough to power ​around 100 million homes.
  • More than 327 GW of ⁠new offshore wind capacity is forecast to be ​added in the next decade, taking global offshore ​wind capacity to 420 GW by the end of 2035, the report said.

Read the full article at Reuters

VIRGINIA: Virginia offshore wind panel discusses Dominion, potential for future projects

June 8, 2026 — No Dominion Energy representative was in attendance at the Virginia Offshore Wind Development Authority meeting earlier this week – even as the utility hopes state regulators sign off on a massive merger.

The panel, which was established in 2010, works to foster development of the industry through research and makes recommendations to help projects reach fruition.

Dominion and NextEra Energy announced a merger in May, which will be subject to “detailed scrutiny” from state regulators in Virginia and North Carolina before being finalized.

Read the full article at WHRO

Fishermen advocate begins campaign against offshore wind, ‘industrializing’ of the ocean

June 8, 2026 — The New England Fishermen’s Stewardship Association began a campaign to bring attention to what it says is a radical climate activism’s “industrializing” of the ocean through green energy agendas and the disastrous effect such objectives have on commercial fishermen’s livelihoods.

President of the fishermen advocacy Aaron Williams told The Center Square that his organization’s campaign “is intended to bring attention to the growing concerns many commercial fishermen, seafood producers, and coastal communities have regarding the rapid expansion of offshore wind development in productive fishing grounds.”

Read the full article at the Center Square

7 states sue Trump administration over nearly $1 billion deal to halt offshore wind farm

June 3, 2026 — Seven states are suing the Trump administration over a nearly $1 billion deal to end French energy company TotalEnergies’ offshore wind development off the East Coast, accusing the deal of being “unlawful.”

In March, the U.S. Department of the Interior reached a $928 million deal with TotalEnergies to halt construction of the wind farms and redirect the investment into domestic fossil fuel initiatives. The “landmark agreement” was described by the Interior Department as a way to lower energy costs and strengthen the nation’s energy security.

Attorneys general in seven states in the Northeast, including Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont, filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Tuesday, alleging the Trump administration illegally used nearly $1 billion in taxpayer dollars for the deal.

The coalition also accuses the deal of violating the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which restricts the Interior Department’s ability to cancel offshore wind leases.

Read the full article at ABC News

Blue States Sue Trump Administration Over Offshore Wind Deal

June 3, 2026 — Seven Democratic-controlled states sued the Trump administration on Tuesday over its move to block a planned wind farm off the coast of New York.

The lawsuit seeks to overturn an extraordinary deal that the Trump administration reached in March with the French energy giant TotalEnergies. That agreement saw the government pay TotalEnergies $928 million to abandon plans to build the wind project off New York and another one off North Carolina.

The New York attorney general, Letitia James, filed the suit in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Ms. James, a Democrat, said in a statement that the deal violated at least two federal laws and that it would harm New York’s economy and power grid.

“This administration cooked up a sham deal to pay a foreign energy company hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to abandon offshore wind and invest in oil and gas instead,” she said. “We are fighting back to stop this illegal agreement that threatens to erase over a thousand union jobs and cheat millions of New Yorkers out of clean, affordable energy.”

Read the full article at The New York Times

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