Saving Seafood

Nantucket Residents Appeal Vineyard Wind Decision

September 27, 2023 — A group of Nantucketers is challenging key environmental approvals for Vineyard Wind, the offshore wind energy farm under construction south of Martha’s Vineyard.

Nantucket Residents Against Turbines filed an appeal with the First Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals Saturday, calling on the court to overrule a district court’s decision to dismiss the group’s prior lawsuit. The residents previously alleged the federal agencies involved in permitting Vineyard Wind failed to consider the impacts of the project’s 62 turbines on the critically endangered right whale, which is known to swim through the Cape and Islands’ waters.

The lawsuit is one of several courtroom battles that have been waged in an attempt to stop Vineyard Wind. The project is expected to be the first commercial-scale offshore wind farm in the country and could start producing energy this fall. Construction started earlier this year, and the farm has come out victorious in other legal cases.

The Nantucket residents initially sued the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and the National Marine Fisheries Service in 2021. In May, a federal court judge in Boston dismissed the case.

But the group contends the case needs reconsideration.

“Absent an order from this Court reversing the District Court summary judgment denial, the project, which is now in the inchoate stages of construction, will be permitted to continue, sending the already highly endangered [North Atlantic right whale] careening further down the road toward extinction,” the group wrote in its appeal.

Read the full article at the Vineyard Gazette

“Road Toward Extinction” – Nantucket Group Appeals Vineyard Wind Decision

September 25, 2023 — A group of Nantucket residents has appealed the dismissal of a lawsuit aimed at stopping the Vineyard Wind offshore wind energy project, which is currently under construction in the waters southwest of the island.

The group ACK For Whales – formerly known as Nantucket Residents Against Turbines – filed the appeal Saturday with the First Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals and is seeking to overturn the May 2023 decision of U.S. District Court judge Indira Talwani, who dismissed the original complaint.

ACK For Whales believes that the federal agencies involved in permitting the Vineyard Wind project – including the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the National Marine Fisheries Service – failed to properly consider the impacts Vineyard Wind could have on endangered North Atlantic right whales.

Those agencies “failed to utilize the best scientific and commercial data available, and failed to adequately consider a number of important, significant risks to the North Atlantic Right Whales induced by the Project, and incorrectly found that the suite of mitigation measures would adequately obviate North Atlantic Right Whale injury and death,” the group said in its appellant brief.

The failure, ACK For Whales asserted, constitutes a violation of the federal Endangered Species Act.

Vineyard Wind did not immediately return a request for comment on Sunday. The company, owned by Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners and Avangrid Renewables (a subsidiary of the Spanish energy giant Iberdrola), stated earlier this year when the original complaint was dismissed that the review by the federal agencies had been “rigorous and thorough.”

Read the full article at the Nantucket Current

Two Sides to Wind Farm Debate: Ocean Perils vs. Much-Needed Renewable Energy

September 23, 2023 — The Pulitzer Center supported this story through its Connected Coastlines project.

A Rhode Island citizen activist made a powerful pitch about the dangers of offshore wind projects to a mostly supportive audience in Westport, Mass., on Tuesday, and a small group of pro-offshore wind observers pushed back afterward, accusing the speaker of bias and distortion.

The speaker at the Sept. 19 event, Lisa Knight, is one of the founders and leaders of Green Oceans, a Little Compton-based citizens group that is using media, small-group meetings, and promises of forthcoming legal actions to block wind projects in development off the coast of Rhode Island and Massachusetts.

She said, “People believe what they want to believe,” a comment that was heartily seconded by a wind-farm supporter.

Knight’s comments were delivered to a live audience and were also livestreamed on YouTube, one of a series of gatherings Green Oceans had hosted since the start of this year. She touched on many topics, including the fossil fuel industry origins of some wind developers; potential harms of wind farms to the ocean environment and animals; dangers to fishermen; costs of electricity created by wind power; and the permitting decisions of federal and state agencies that, she said, are giving wind developers a free pass.

About 60 people attended the talk, and a few dozen more watched online.

During the Q&A period, a man in the audience said, “Listening to this, I don’t know who the bad guys are.” Knight replied, “They are the same people,” pursuing her earlier theme that wind farm developers are former oil industry people.

At present, the South Fork and Vineyard Wind projects are permitted and under construction from bases in Long Island, N.Y., and New Bedford, Mass. Revolution Wind, to be constructed from ports in Rhode Island, has received most of its permits and hopes to begin construction next year. SouthCoast, Sunrise, Revolution 2, and other wind projects are grinding through the permitting process. Regardless of where the wind-generated electricity makes landfall, the turbines will be built in a giant patch of the ocean, or wind lease area, southeast of the coast of Martha’s Vineyard.

Stephen Porder, a professor at Brown University, the associate provost for sustainability, and part of a group of pro-wind industry activists, watched the session online and commented afterward. He said Knight’s talk was riddled with examples of cherry-picking data “to make it appear that something is happening when it is not.” Porder also said Knight often would “mistake correlation with causation,” meaning that she assigned causes to events that simply happened at the same time.

“I’m getting older and the planet is getting warmer, but global warming is not causing me to get old,” Porder said, by way of illustrating many of Knight’s arguments.

Read the full article at ecoRI News

Turbines are in the water – offshore wind has arrived in Massachusetts

September 23, 2023 — After more than two decades of proposing and planning, offshore wind is up and spinning. Fifteen miles off the coast of Matha’s Vineyard, the Vineyard Wind Project is installing 62 massive turbines. They estimate that this $4 billion project will power 400,000 homes and businesses. But some environmentalists believe the project could cause more harm than good.

Offshore wind is making a splash in New England, but it isn’t new to the Bay State. For more than two decades, plans for offshore wind turbines have been under discussion. Nearly 20 years after developers proposed the Cape Wind project in Nantucket Sound – a project that was eventually scrapped – offshore wind is up and spinning.

Fifteen miles off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, 62 turbines are being built for the Vineyard Wind project. Nearby, eight other developments have wind energy leases. However, offshore wind projects will soon span beyond Southeastern Massachusetts. In 2022, the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management began gaging interest for offshore wind projects in the Gulf of Maine.

“Massachusetts has been called the Saudi Arabia of offshore wind. Within the United States, Massachusetts probably has the best wind energy resource offshore compared to any other state,” Christopher Niezrecki, director, Center for Energy Innovation and WindSTAR Center at UMass Lowell.

Read the full article at WCVB

New England ports prepare for offshore wind

September 23, 2023 — As the offshore wind industry grows in New England, more infrastructure is needed to support these massive turbines. In 2012, the Port of New Bedford began to prepare for the future of offshore wind by upgrading its existing port.

Ports like Providence, Rhode Island; Salem, Massachusetts; and New London, Connecticut, are just some of the regional ports vying for offshore wind developers. As technology improves and turbines get larger, space becomes a challenge. The city of New Bedford is preparing for the future by building a new terminal within the Port of New Bedford. This new terminal stands on what was recently water.

“It’s a complicated project interrelated with a number of other activities within the port that’s using dredged material to fill that area and create the space. When complete early next year, it’ll be another 10.5 acres of space that could be used possibly for more commercial fishing or to support offshore wind,” Gordon Carr, Executive Director of the New Bedford Port Authority, said.

Read the full article at WCVB

Our View: Wind industry lull calls for better plan, not paying more

September 21, 2o23 — The stalling offshore wind industry has been the talk of the summer among supporters and foes in early adopter New Jersey. Now it’s official. A big headline in The Wall Street Journal this month proclaimed “U.S. wind-farm revolution is broken.”

The week before, world’s largest offshore wind-farm developer Ørsted announced that the nation’s first offshore wind farm off Atlantic City will start producing power a year later than planned, in 2026. The Danish company cited supply chain issues, higher interest rates and insufficient federal tax credits among reasons for the delay.

Ørsted has several other East Coast projects at earlier stages of development. These so far won’t be delayed, including a second wind farm off Atlantic City and ones in New York and Rhode Island. Two, in Maryland and Delaware, will be changed to make their finances acceptable to the company. The New Jersey Legislature and Gov. Phil Murphy sweetened the financing of the first farm earlier this year by allowing Ørsted to keep federal tax credits that were to be passed through to ratepayers.

Read the full article at the Press of Atlantic City

VIRGINIA: Dominion offers Virginia Beach $19 million for offshore wind transmission easements

September 20, 2023 — Dominion Energy wants to pay Virginia Beach $19 million for roughly 4 miles of city easements to transmit energy from its offshore wind project. The power company has also agreed to provide $1.14 million to replace trees that will be razed to make room for the transmission lines and power poles.

Director of Public Works LJ Hansen briefed the City Council on the transmission easement proposal Tuesday.

The Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind farm will be 27 miles off the coast of Virginia Beach and will include 176 wind turbines. It will generate energy to power up to 660,000 homes, according to Dominion.

Offshore construction is scheduled to begin next year

Read the full article at the Virginian-Pilot

Federal Report Confirms Offshore Wind Effect on Whales Produces ‘Temporary Behavioral Changes’

September 20, 2023 — With offshore wind projects being blamed for the increase in deaths in whale species in New Jersey and along the East Coast in 2023, the NOAA has issued a final determination on the effects of sonar mapping and wind farms on marine wildlife.

This week, the federal agency issued a ruling on a Virginia offshore wind project. The opinion says effects the wind farm projects has on whales is only ‘temporary behavioral changes’, adding that the uptick in whale deaths is unrelated to projects being touted by the Biden administration.

Read the full article at Shore News Network

Governors warn Biden offshore wind projects ‘increasingly at risk of failing

September 19, 2023 — Governors of six Northeast states are asking the Biden administration to boost federal tax credits for offshore wind developers, give their states a share of revenue from offshore energy leases and hasten permitting for the projects.

In a Sept. 13 letter, the governors of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey and Maryland urgently called for more federal support for their states’ wind power agreements with developers. Echoing statements from Ørsted and other wind companies seeking to revise agreements, the governors wrote that “inflationary pressures, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the lingering supply chain disruptions resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic have created extraordinary economic challenges that threaten to reverse these offshore wind gains.”

“Instead of continued price declines, offshore wind faces cost increases in orders of magnitude that threaten States’ ability to make purchasing decisions,” the letter states. “These pressures are affecting not only procurements of new offshore wind but, critically, previously procured projects already in the pipeline.

“Absent intervention, these near-term projects are increasingly at risk of failing. Without federal action, offshore wind deployment in the U.S. is at serious risk of stalling because States’ ratepayers may be unable to absorb these significant new costs alone.”

Read the full article at WorkBoat

Can Fishing and Offshore Wind Coexist in the Gulf of Maine? It Depends, Experts Say

September 19, 2023 — Fisherman David Goethel is looking at the prospect of large scale wind production in the Gulf of Maine and what changes that may mean to fish behavior, marine environment and life as it has been known on the ocean for centuries.

He told an online seminar for the New Hampshire Network for Environmental, Energy and Climate Monday night that “Europe built first and studied later,” the impacts to turbines in their waters.

He said people should also think of food security versus energy security when they look at impacts.

“It’s just as vital and yet, I don’t think it’s getting enough discussion,” he told about 60 people listening to the presentation entitled “Planning for Offshore Wind AND Sustainable Fisheries in New England.”

The central question discussed was can both fishing and renewable wind harvesting coexist and what would the impacts be?

Panelists said it depends on what is built, where and who provides input in the planning.

Read the full article at InDepthNH.org