Saving Seafood

Fifth Circuit postpones federal ruling on offshore lease sales in Gulf of Mexico

September 28, 2023 — Last week a federal judge ruled the Biden administration must go through with offshore lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico by Sept. 27 as originally planned and under original conditions. One week later, the Fifth Circuit amended the ruling, pushing back the lease sale date to Nov. 8.

Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, who sued over another restriction imposed on the industry, said the ruling was “a major win not only for the rule of law, but also for Louisiana jobs and affordable energy. At a time when working families are being squeezed by unaffordable Bidenomics, I am glad to deliver yet another victory defeating overreaching bureaucrats.

“Congress is clear: lease sales must take place; so we are grateful the Judge cut through the noise and upheld the law,” Landry added. He also said “our fight is far from over,” the initial ruling granted relief “against the President’s latest attack on reliable and affordable American energy.”

The U.S. oil and natural gas industry, led by the Gulf states of Texas and Louisiana, have set records in petroleum exports and led in exports of liquified natural gas in the first half of 2023. The industry has also provided a “lifeline” to European countries reducing reliance on Russia and suffering from failed “green energy” policies, according to data previously reported on by The Center Square.

Read the full article The Center Square

 

Threat to whales cited in wind project appeal

September 27, 2023 — A group of Nantucket residents opposed to an offshore wind installation that is nearing completion want another round in their long-running legal fight.

The Nantucket Residents Against Turbines organization, which refers to itself as ACK RATS, late last week filed an appeal challenging a federal judge’s ruling in May that effectively dismissed the group’s prior complaint against the Vineyard Wind project.

Plaintiffs continue to argue that federal regulators including the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management failed to consider risks the wind turbines pose to North Atlantic right whales, an endangered species with only a few hundred animals remaining in the wild. Citing the threat of vessel strikes and whales experiencing hearing loss from turbine pile-driving and operation, the group alleges that allowing Vineyard Wind to proceed will push the whales closer to a “watery grave.”

Read the full article at WWLP

Nantucket group files appeal in lawsuit against wind turbine farm off Martha’s Vineyard; alleges right whales in danger

September 27, 2023 — A group opposing an offshore wind farm being built south of Martha’s Vineyard has appealed a ruling that dismissed its lawsuit to halt the project, arguing that a “gravely flawed environmental review” failed to consider the dangers the turbines pose to the vulnerable North Atlantic Right Whale population.

Nantucket Residents Against Turbines filed its appeal last week in the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, after US District Court Judge Indira Talwani in May dismissed its lawsuit, records show.

The defendants are the US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Marine Fisheries Service, US Interior Secretary Debra Haaland, US Commerce Secretary Gina M. Raimondo, and wind farm developer Vineyard Wind 1 LLC, according to court records and the group’s lawyer, Thomas Stavola Jr.

Read the full article at the Boston Globe

California takes big first step toward floating offshore wind

September 27, 2023 — California has a goal of building gigawatts of wind power off its coast by the end of the decade. To meet that goal, it has to create a floating offshore wind industry from scratch.

Last week, state lawmakers took a key step in that process: passing a bill that would help California kick-start its nascent offshore wind industry by purchasing massive amounts of power from early-stage projects that might be too big or too risky for other potential buyers.

The passage of AB 1373, which Governor Gavin Newsom (D) has pledged to sign into law, is just the first in a series of steps needed to build the massive offshore transmission lines, port facilities, turbine manufacturing capacity and extensive supply chains needed to reach its goals. But energy industry groups agree that without the central procurement mechanism the bill aims to create, California’s offshore wind ambitions won’t become reality.

“This was the tip-of-the-spear issue,” said Molly Croll, director of Pacific offshore wind at American Clean Power, a clean energy trade group. ​“It doesn’t provide complete market certainty — but it provides much more market clarity than we had before.”

If signed into law, AB 1373 would allow the California Public Utilities Commission to authorize the California Department of Water Resources, which operates dams and aqueducts across the state, to sign contracts committing to purchase gigawatts’ worth of generation from yet-to-be-built offshore wind farms and then pass the costs on to all Californians.

Read the full article at Canary Media

NOAA could designate cod habitat around Cox Ledge, wind power sites

September 27, 2023 — The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is considering whether to outline a “habitat area of particular concern’ in and around offshore wind lease areas off southern New England.

The proposal, originated by the New England Fishery Management Council over concerns of how wind development will affect essential fish habitat, would include Cox Ledge, an important bottom area for cod spawning. NOAA, the Bureau of Offshore Energy Management, fishermen and wind power developers have grappled for years over how to build turbine arrays while protecting cod habitat in the region.

The often-bitter debate was one factor in the Sept. 1 mass resignation of the Rhode Island Fishermen’s Advisory Board, whose members charged the state Coastal Resource Management Council is too deferential to wind development interests at the expense of habitat and fisheries impacts.

NOAA Fisheries on Sept. 26 published the proposal for a formal habitat of particular concern (HAPC) designation around Cox Ledge and wind energy leases in the Federal Register, opening a 30-day public comment period.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

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