Saving Seafood

Offshore wind sparks new lawsuits

April 18, 2024 — A federal lawsuit has been filed against the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and three other federal agencies for an offshore wind project off the coast of Rhode Island.

Non-partisan, Rhode Island-based Green Oceans has filed the lawsuit, claiming the bureau has broken the law by giving Danish energy company Orsted permits for their South Fork Wind and Revolution Wind projects.

Dr Lisa Quattrocki Knight, the president and co-founder of Green Oceans, said their lawsuit is about where these wind farms will be located — at Coxes Ledge off the Rhode Island coast.

“It is an incredibly biodiverse marine ecosystem that NOAA designated in November as a habitat of particular concern because it is one of the last remaining spawning grounds for southern New England Cod,” Quattrocki Knight said. “And is a winter foraging region for five endangered whale species. Nothing should ever have been developed on Coxes Ledge and yet they have gone ahead and permitted these two projects.”

Read the full story at WSHU

 

The Power Struggle Behind Rhode Island’s Offshore Wind Farms

April 18, 2024 — Right now, 60 percent of the electricity in the United States is generated by fossil fuel, compared to 21 percent renewables. Of the latter, wind power accounts for a little over 10 percent, according to the latest data provided by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. But in March 2021, President Joe Biden announced his administration would marshal the resources of the federal government to meet a new clean energy goal: deploy thirty gigawatts of offshore wind in the United States by 2030, “while protecting biodiversity and promoting ocean co-use.” 

The waters off the New England coast will be particularly busy. Currently, there are nine active leases for wind farms, stacked diagonally in a grid of turbines placed one nautical mile apart, covering a roughly 909,000-nautical-square-mile area about fifteen miles south of the Rhode Island coast, midway between Block Island and Martha’s Vineyard. To date, BOEM has approved the constructionand operation plans for two projects, Revolution Wind and South Fork Wind, both developed by Danish renewable energy company Ørsted with partner Eversource, which has since sold its stake in those projects. Revolution, a sixty-five-turbine farm, will deliver power to 350,000 homes in Rhode Island and Connecticut. South Fork, with twelve turbines, will deliver power to 70,000 Long Island homes. A third lease — the Sunwise Wind project, with eighty-four turbines — is in the early stages.

The fishing industry fears the effects on fish stocks and fishing. For example, on the sea surface, the spacing of the turbines can create navigational hazards; below, the displacement of boulders on the sea floor to lay transmission cables can create obstructions to nets, says Fred Mattera, who is executive director of the Commercial Fisheries Center of Rhode Island and has served as a fisheries representative on the construction plans and compensation packages for offshore wind farm projects. In September, the entire Rhode Island Fishermen’s Advisory Board quit in protest after the CRMC granted its approval to Ørsted’s Sunrise project.

“We love to build and deal with the consequences later. We have stakeholders that represent half a billion dollars and thousands of jobs in the fishing community,” Mattera says. “Are we willing to give that up? I do believe there will be damage to the ecosystem because there’s too many uncertainties.”

Read the full story at Rhode Island Monthly

MASSACHUSETTS: A submerged concern: offshore wind cables

April 18, 2024 — As offshore wind turbines undergo construction in waters south of the Vineyard, and with some already standing and delivering power, the debates on the Island regarding the industry continue.

And amid the conversations over a necessity for clean energy, and whether the projects are a blow to the Vineyard’s natural charm — coupled with a mix of online misinformation campaigns against the offshore wind industry — one subject has remained submerged: undersea cables.

While cables — which connect wind farms to the New England power grid on the mainland — aren’t the flashiest parts of an offshore wind farm operation, some are nervous about what may lie ahead with them.

John Keene, president of the Martha’s Vineyard Fishermen’s Preservation Trust, told the Times that some in the fishing industry are nervous about how the electromagnetic field from the cables can affect marine life.

Keene said the concern is that the fields emitted from cables could act like a fence, particularly for migratory species, and impact the behavior of marine species.

“There’s a lot of unknowns,” he said.

Read the full story at the MV Times

VIRGINIA: Dominion’s ship is coming in for its offshore wind project

April 16, 2024 — The ship Dominion Energy needs to install 176 giant wind turbines in the Atlantic Ocean, 27 miles off the Virginia Beach Oceanfront, has been launched, as the utility has won its 11th and final federal permit for the $9 billion project.

The ship, called Charybdis, is a U.S. flag vessel.

That means Dominion can stage all of the components for the more than 800-foot-tall turbines in Virginia port facilities — it had to shuttle these from Halifax, Nova Scotia, for the first two, smaller turbines it installed on its ocean lease.

The only ship Dominion could find to do the work was registered in Luxembourg, and U.S. law bars foreign flag ships from moving cargo between U.S. points.

Read the full article at Richmond Times-Dispatch

Officials search for offshore wind radar interference fix

April 16, 2024 — Racing against the Biden administration’s clean energy agenda, members of Congress are pressing for a solution for wind turbines that interfere with plane radars before more offshore wind projects are approved.

As turbines continue to expand in size and number, they create clutter on radar systems that increase the false alarm detection rate. In response, these systems raise the threshold considered a detection and, as a result, may miss actual targets.

The turbines don’t just impact air traffic control and flight safety, but also radar associated with weather forecasting and warnings, coastal sea-surface and maritime surveillance, oceanographic measurements, and homeland and national defense missions, according to the Energy Department.

Read the full article at Roll Call

Revolution Wind Facing Legal Turbulence

April 14, 2024 — As Danish Energy developer Ørsted is preparing to start work on its Revolution Wind offshore energy farm, a lawsuit may create problems before construction can get underway for the 65-turbine project that is expected to power homes in Connecticut and Rhode Island.

The agency that granted Ørsted the permit for the project, the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), is being challenged in federal district court by two Rhode Island non-profits, The Preservation Society of Newport County and The Southeast Lighthouse Foundation, who claim the agency is flouting the law and ignoring the rights of historic organizations as well as indigenous tribes. The nonprofits also claim that the turbines will spoil the uncluttered view of the ocean for residents and tourists and as such threaten their communities’ livelihoods.

In November 2023 the law firm Cultural Heritage Partners filed lawsuits against BOEM for both South Fork Wind and Revolution Wind (appeals one and two), alleging that BOEM ignored the National Historic Preservation Act, which was legislation intended to preserve historic and archaeological sites in the United States. The act created the National Register of Historic Places, the list of National Historic Landmarks, and the State Historic Preservation Offices.

The lawsuits also allege that the BOEM ignored The National Environmental Policy Act, which requires federal agencies to assess the environmental effects of their proposed actions prior to making decisions.

Read the full article at CT News Junkie

Feds Sign Off on New England Wind

April 9, 2024 — The nation’s eighth commercial-scale offshore wind energy project received federal approval earlier this month to move ahead with its plans for 129 turbines off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard.

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management on April 2 greenlighted New England Wind for an area about 20 nautical miles south of the Island. The company expects it could generate up to 2,600 megawatts, the largest claim from any of the projects in the regulatory pipeline.

New England Wind now joins Vineyard Wind, Revolution Wind and Sunrise Wind, South Fork Wind and others off the Mid-Atlantic states in approved projects.

Today, we celebrate the incredible progress being made toward achieving our goal of 30 gigawatts of offshore wind energy capacity by 2030,” said Deb Haaland, the secretary of the Interior Department. “The New England Wind project will help lower consumer costs, combat climate change, create jobs to support families, and ensure economic opportunities are accessible to all communities.”

Read the full article at the Vineyard Gazette

Dead right whale off Virginia likely hit by ship, calf unlikely to survive

April 6, 2024 — According to a release from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Marine Fisheries Service this week, an endangered North Atlantic right whale found dead off the Virginia Coast late last month was likely killed by a ship strike.

The release states that on April 2, experts conducted a necropsy on the adult female North Atlantic right whale #1950. “Preliminary findings included catastrophic injuries with a dislocation of the whale’s spine and fractures to all vertebrae in the lower back,” the release states. “These findings are consistent with blunt force trauma from a vessel strike prior to death. Additional histological and diagnostic testing of samples is pending. NOAA’s Office of Law Enforcement is investigating this incident.”

Experts believe there are fewer than 360 North American right whales alive.

Read the full article at the News-Times

Offshore wind proposals help New Bedford focus its workforce development

April 5, 2024 — All news about offshore wind inevitably leads many in New Bedford back to the same question: So, will this bring more jobs?

That was true once again last week when three major wind developers submitted project bids that include significant investment into New Bedford’s port.

Projects from Vineyard Offshore and Avangrid, two of the developers, proposed New Bedford as the maintenance hub for wind farms that could eventually power hundreds of thousands of homes. Avangrid’s proposal would also bring a crane manufacturing facility to New Bedford, operated by the Danish company Liftra. It would be the first of its kind in the United States.

Though bids are still subject to negotiation and approval, New Bedford’s waterfront celebrated the announcements and signaled optimism for future employment.

“I think it’s incredibly good news for the port of New Bedford,” said Gordon Carr, executive director of the New Bedford Port Authority. “We’re very pleased with the investment into long-underutilized and brownfield properties.”

Carr said long-lasting jobs in manufacturing and in wind-farm operations and maintenance would make the offshore wind industry a sustainable employer in New Bedford. “The supply chain businesses that you see in more mature ports in Europe will start showing up in New Bedford,” he said. He added that new investment and development is going toward currently “underutilized” properties, meaning that “there’s no displacement of commercial fishing or processing along the waterfront.”

Read the full article at the New Bedford Light

Two Mass-based offshore wind farms clear biggest federal hurdle

April 4, 2024 –Two wind farms bidding for a contract in Massachusetts have cleared a major federal hurdle by receiving a favorable Record of Decision, a combined approval by agencies responsible for ocean energy, marine fisheries, and waterways engineering.

The projects are New England Wind 1 and 2, formerly called Park City Wind and Commonwealth Wind. Both are owned by Avangrid and are covered by a single decision.

Although the projects need additional federal permits, the decision announced Tuesday is considered the primary approval from the Biden administration, said Ken Kimmell, Avangrid’s chief development officer for offshore wind.

Read the full article at CAI