Saving Seafood

VIRGINIA: Dominion secures another offshore wind lease — right next to Virginia Beach project

August 15, 2024 — The new lease site could yield enough electricity to power up to 1.4 million homes, according to the federal government.

Dominion Energy has snagged another offshore wind lease about 35 miles from the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management announced after an online auction Wednesday.

Dominion’s winning bid was just over $17.6 million for the 176,000-acre site, which directly adjoins its Coastal Virginia Offshore Project already under construction off the Virginia Beach Oceanfront.

That’s more than 10 times what the company paid for its current 112,000-acre lease more than a decade ago, when the U.S. offshore wind industry was yet to fully emerge.

The new lease site could yield enough electricity to power up to 1.4 million homes, according to BOEM.

Dominion’s ongoing CVOW project will include 176 wind turbines and is expected to power about 660,000 homes. The company has installed 54 turbine foundations since construction began in May, and plans to finish by late 2026.

Read the full article at WHRO

Dominion and Equinor Win Central Atlantic Wind Leases Paying Total of $93M

August 15, 2024 — The U.S. Department of the Interior is reporting strong interest in its latest offshore wind auction completed yesterday for sites off the Central Atlantic states. A total of six companies participated in the auction for the two sites offered with the winning bids of $92.65 million from Dominion Energy and Equinor.

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management conducted the auction which was scheduled in June for sites located offshore from Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. They highlighted that it was the first offshore sale in the region in a decade. Combined the two sites have the potential for an additional 2.2 million homes or the capacity for approximately 6.3 GW according to the Department of the Interior.

Equinor Wind provisionally won a lease for 101,443 acres located approximately 26 nautical miles from Delaware Bay. The company’s winning bid was just over $75 million. Equinor highlights the potential for around 2 GW of power from the lease area.

Read the full article at The Maritime Executive

Feds’ offshore wind sale nets $93M

August 15, 2024 — The Biden administration scooped $93 million from offshore wind developers Wednesday in a sale off the coast of Delaware and Virginia, striking a bullish note for President Joe Biden’s offshore wind legacy despite the industry’s economic headwinds.

Just two leases were up for bid in the central Atlantic sale. A wind lease off the coast of Delaware netted $75 million, from the Norwegian energy giant Equinor, according to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s preliminary results.

A second lease area, off the coast of Virginia Beach, was scooped up for almost $18 million by the Richmond-based utility Dominion Energy. Dominion was the sole bidder for that lease, which lies adjacent to the 176-turbine Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind farm that Dominion is currently building.

Read the full article at E&E News

Scientists and Fishermen Agree About Uncertainty of Offshore Wind’s Impact

August 15, 2024 — Newport’s Energy and Environ­ment Commission hosted a panel discussion on Aug. 8, “The Effect of Climate Change and Offshore Wind on Fisheries and Ocean Ecosys­tems,” where representatives from NOAA, the URI Graduate School of Oceanography, The Commercial Fisheries Center of Rhode Island, and the Kingston -based Commer­cial Fisheries Research Foundation responded to a series of prompts posed by commission Vice Chair Emily Conklin.

A Q&A session followed, with about 60 people gathered at City Hall to participate. Many in atten­dance brought strong opinions both for and against the large- scale offshore wind development projects being built off the coast of Newport and Little Compton.

During the public Q&A, mul­tiple people voiced skepticism about the quality of research being conducted by URI and other local institutions due to the fact that offshore wind companies have funded some of the studies. Jeremy Collie, a professor of ocean­ography at URI, pushed back on the notion that research funded by the offshore wind developers is in­herently biased or untrustworthy .

Read the full article at Newport This Week

Feds allow Vineyard Wind to resume partial installation

August 14, 2024 –A fully loaded feeder barge with turbine components, which for weeks has been sitting in New Bedford, left port and headed out to the Vineyard Wind site Tuesday morning. There, a vessel will offload the nacelle and tower components, but the blades will stay on and return to port.

The federal government this week updated its suspension order, allowing the project-on-pause to resume partial installation of new turbines as the parties continue to analyze the blade failure, which happened one month ago.

The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE)’s latest suspension order continues to prohibit further blade installation or power production at this time.

In response to a request for comment, a BSEE spokesperson said the agency issued the latest suspension order on August 10. The order requires “risk analysis and mitigation approved by BSEE prior to being able to conduct any activities on the damaged turbine.”

Read the full article at The New Bedford Light

New Study Examines How Wind Turbines May Affect Ocean Floor

August 14, 2024 — Over the next ten years, thousands of wind turbines will be installed along the Atlantic coast of North America. This will be the biggest change to the sea floor in the area since the last Ice Age ended about 14,000 years ago.

A new research study, conducted by Kevin D. E. Stokesbury, N. David Bethoney, Felipe Restrepo, Bradley P. Harris, and sponsored by the Commercial Fisheries Research Foundation has been conducted to:

  1. Understand the differences between the sea floor in areas where wind turbines will be built and other locations;
  2. Help scientists predict how the ecosystem might change when the turbines are installed;
  3. Provide a detailed picture of the current sea floor, so future changes can be measured accurately after the turbines are in place. 

To understand what the sea floor is like now, scientists combined two large sets of data. One set comes from underwater camera surveys done from 2003 to 2019, and the other set is from geological studies dating back to 1966. They used this information to create detailed maps of the sea floor from Virginia Beach to the Gulf of Maine, down to a depth of about 300 meters. These maps show the probability of finding different types of materials on the sea floor, like rocks or sand, in specific areas.

Background

Offshore wind energy development goals are set to bring thousands of wind turbines to the North American Atlantic coast over the next decade. Such rapid development will significantly change the underwater environment. For example, currently soft seabeds (mud, sand, etc.) will have new hard structures introduced by wind farms (towers, foundation base materials, etc.). To understand the impact of wind farm development on marine habitats, we need to gather baseline information on the current state of these underwater areas.

What We Did
We studied the ocean floor along the East Coast of the United States using historical data. This involved using data collected from 2003 to 2019 by camera surveys from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth School for Marine Science and Technology and marine sediment data from the United States Geological Survey dating back to 1966. We wanted to map the composition of the ocean floor before wind farm development began, so we looked at the percentages of mud, sand, gravel, cobble, shell, and rock in different areas. Then, we created maps to show where each of these types of substrate are found.


Photo: The six substrate types based on the Wentworth scale for the SMAST drop camera samples. Credit: Stokesbury, K. D. E., Bethoney, N. D., Restrepo, F., & Harris, B. P. (2024). Anticipating the winds of change: A baseline assessment of Northeastern US continental shelf surficial substrates. Fisheries Oceanography, e12693

What We Found
1) Across all of the areas we mapped, sand was the dominant bottom type (found in 59% of areas), followed by mud (34%), and gravel (6%).

2) Areas slated for wind farm development had different substrate types than the rest of the continental shelf. For example, wind farm lease areas predominately had a mix of sand (99% of areas) and shell (92%) as their substrates.

Looking Forward

Wind farm lease areas currently consist mainly of soft-bottom habitats with low percentages of harder substrates such as gravel, cobble, and rock. Wind farms will add a lot of hard structures to these areas, potentially altering the habitat and species that inhabit these areas, which will likely affect fisheries. The maps created in this study will help us monitor changes to the substrate after wind farm construction. This will provide a more comprehensive view of the impacts of offshore wind on ocean ecosystems.

The published paper on this research, which was led by Dr. Kevin Stokesbury. Dean of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth School for Marine Science and Technology, is available here: “Anticipating the winds of change: A baseline assessment of Northeastern US continental shelf surficial substrates.” 

Work begins to remove broken Vineyard Wind turbine blade

August 14, 2024 — One month since an incident that sent part of a turbine blade plunging into the Atlantic Ocean and littered debris across area beaches, Vineyard Wind said Tuesday that it has cut away much of what remained from the damaged blade and has been cleared to resume some offshore wind construction activities, though it still cannot produce power.

The company said “controlled cutting operations” on Sunday and Monday “removed a substantial amount of the remaining portions of the damaged blade that pose a risk for further debris falling into the ocean.” But Vineyard Wind and blade manufacturer GE Vernova are still trying to finalize plans to do more cutting if necessary, secure and remove debris that fell onto the turbine platform, remove the blade root and deal with debris that’s settled on the seabed.

GE Vernova, the company selected by Vineyard Wind to manufacture its project’s blades and turbines, said last month that it has “no indications of an engineering design flaw” that could have caused the blade failure, but instead thinks it was a result of an issue in the manufacturing process, specifically “insufficient bonding.”

Read the full article at wbur

NEW JERSEY: Van Drew uses forum to slam NJ offshore wind projects

August 14, 2024 — With no letting up in his criticism, U.S. Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-Atlantic) on Tuesday hosted his third public forum so far on the expansion of offshore wind off the Jersey Shore. He was joined by local officials, experts and community members to discuss the broader impacts of offshore wind energy, including costs and the wider effects on the state’s coastal environments.

Van Drew has long contended that the plans to build over 100 giant wind turbines off the coast will have a devastating effect on the environment and the economy.

“This is not the five windmills that you see coming into AC,” he said. “We are talking about hundreds, if not thousands, of wind turbines over 1,000 feet tall that have substances that can leach into our oceans. We are going to decimate our fishing industry which is the third largest industry in the state, but these people don’t care.”

Community members at the Brigantine event on Tuesday also voiced concern about noise and environmental impacts from wind turbines, and others said the costs will fall on taxpayers.

“They are going to cost you a lot of money,” said Van Drew. “Not a little bit, but multiple times. . . Your utility bills are going to go way up. I don’t know about you, but the people I know have a hard time paying their current utility bills before paying all the things they need to.”

Read the full article at the NJ Spotlight

High-Tech “Crawlers” Deployed to Survey Vineyard Wind’s Turbine Blades

August 13, 2024 — A month after an embarrassing incident in which one of the turbine blades broke at the Vineyard Wind offshore wind farm, the developer presented its recovery plan. It is working with the U.S. Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, as well as the U.S. Coast Guard, and has retained Resolve Marine to assist Vineyard Wind and GE Vernova in the recovery effort. At the same time, residents continue to report finding fragments washed up on the shoreline of Massachusetts.

The project continues to repeat the preliminary assessment that is now completed by GE Vernova which cites a “manufacturing deviation” in the bonding of the composite material used to make the blades. The companies had said it was an identifiable issue with the adhesion that should have been discovered during quality control.

The blade initially broke on July 13 while one of the turbines not in service was undergoing testing. The automated safety controls stopped the individual turbine. Parts of the blade remained attached, while some sections were caught on the base and the remainder fell into the water. Elements of the composite material and the lightweight foam began washing up before the blade broke further in the following days. Work at the wind farm both on the turbines in service and construction was suspended and remains under a stop work order from BSEE.

Read the full article at The Maritime Executive

MASSACHUSETTS: More Vineyard Wind turbine pieces fall in ‘controlled detachment,’ debris could hit Nantucket beaches

August 13, 2024 — More pieces of the faulty Vineyard Wind turbine blade fell in a controlled detachment early Sunday morning, and Nantucket beaches remain at risk of seeing more debris wash up in the coming days, town officials reported.

“The controlled detachment follows a series of exercises conducted late last week to pitch the blade, which, in combination with storm winds, led to the safe separation of the sections below the root of the blade,” Nantucket officials stated Sunday night.

Following the July 13 initial malfunction and collapse of the wind turbine, Vineyard Wind and GE Vernova said they’ve developed a “comprehensive plan to recover the remaining AW-38 blade in incremental steps” in a presentation released Friday.

As of Sunday night, teams from the companies are assessing whether the remaining sections “pose a risk of detachment,” Nantucket officials said. The root of the blade, which has a plan in place for its removal, is still attached and being monitored.

Read the full article at The Boston Herald