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Plans to move NOAA hub to Newport are being finalized, Reed says

March 19, 2023 — The federal government is “finalizing plans” to move a National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration marine operations center from Virginia to Naval Station Newport, according to US Senator Jack Reed.

Reed said the move from Norfolk, Va., to Newport would mean a $150 million federal investment and 200 jobs in Rhode Island.

“This is a major win for Rhode Island and our Blue Economy that will help NOAA improve mission fulfillment while achieving savings through consolidation and enhancing collaboration with the Navy, URI, the Coast Guard, and leading ocean scientists and marine businesses,” Reed, a Democrat, said in a news release Wednesday touting the development, as well as his role in it.

Read the full article at the Boston Globe

Ørsted, Eversource propose Revolution Wind 2 project for Rhode Island

March 14, 2023 — Offshore wind partners Ørsted and Eversource submitted a proposal for an 884-megawatt project called Revolution Wind 2 in response to Rhode Island’s newest wind power solicitation, promising “unprecedented investments in port improvements and shipbuilding.”

“Ørsted and Eversource are leading the buildout of a homegrown American offshore wind industry, and Revolution Wind 2 will further advance the state’s leadership position in this growing green jobs sector,” the companies said in announcing their proposal Monday.

Revolution Wind 2 would be a second phase in the developers’ plans for their federal wind energy lease area, on a tract south of the current Revolution Wind project area that starts about 18 miles south of Point Judith, R.I.

With the 2016 installation of five wind turbines off Block Island in 2016, Rhode Island became the first base for the U.S. offshore wind industry. The 30 MW Block Island Wind Farm, built by start-up Deepwater Wind and later acquired by Ørsted, has had its share of troubles, ranging from erosion exposing sea floor cables to turbine outages. But it played a big role in establishing Rhode Island as a base for future utility-scale projects off southern New England.

Read the full article at Workboat

New York’s Wind Power Future Is Taking Shape. In Rhode Island.

February 22, 2023 — When Gov. Kathy Hochul laid out her plan for accelerating the development of New York’s offshore wind industry a year ago, she promised thousands of jobs for state residents.

Today, New York’s first wind farm in the Atlantic Ocean is under construction. Crews in hard hats are assembling platforms for giant turbines and building boats that will ferry technicians onto the water to ensure the massive blades keep rotating.

But the work is not being done in New York. It is happening more than 150 miles away in Rhode Island.

States and cities all along the East Coast are vying with New York to be hubs for the fast-growing business of harnessing wind power offshore. But Rhode Island took the lead by building the first offshore wind farm in the United States several years ago. Centrally located among projects planned from New York to Massachusetts, the nation’s smallest state has held on to many of the jobs and economic benefits that go with being first.

Read the full article at The New York Times

Northeast ropeless gear experiments start off Massachusetts, Rhode Island

February 10, 2023 — In the coming weeks, up to 30 New England commercial trap and pot fishing vessels will be involved in testing experimental on-demand gear systems – so-called ropeless gear that the National Marine Fisheries Service hopes could be one long-term solution to reduce the danger of whale entanglement in vertical trap lines.

The cooperative program with NMFS and its Northeast Fisheries Science Center began on Feb. 1 and continues through April 30, in areas closed to vertical lines and buoys to reduce entanglement risk.

The federally permitted trap vessels will fish up to 10 trawls each, using different designs of on-demand gear, activated by acoustic signals for retrieval, in federal waters of the South Island Restricted Area and the Massachusetts Restricted Area while those areas are otherwise closed to lobster and Jonah crab gear that use vertical lines.

“During this time, on-demand trap/pot gear set on the bottom will not be marked at the water’s surface because on-demand gear does not have surface buoys,” according to a fisheries science center summary of the experiment plan.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

Revolution Wind Turbines’ Effects on Life in the Sea and on the Seafloor Remain Unclear

February 7, 2023 — Distant cousins of the machines that dotted the Dutch countryside to pump the ocean back into its bed, sentimentalized in art for 500 years, that have been slimmed down and redesigned in the 21st century to fight global warming, will be hammered into the seafloor in glacial rock laid down 2.8 million years ago during the Pleistocene epoch.

Standing at a weird intersection of natural forces, human intervention, and climate disaster, windmills are now hip, and controversial.

But can wind turbines — what used to be windmills — off the coast of Rhode Island live up to their renewable energy promise? And what effects will they have on life in the sea?

Hundreds of experts from the U.S. Department of the Interior down to local fishermen and town planners are puzzling over these questions, especially now, during the permitting and approval process of the Revolution Wind project, in which developers Ørsted and Eversource hope to install up to 100 wind turbines on the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) about 18 miles southeast of Point Judith. Cables to transmit power to the grid would make landfall in North Kingstown, and the project is expected to be online by 2025. The Draft Environmental Impact Statement for the project was published last fall.

Among the experts looking at the question of known and unknown impacts of an offshore wind facility on the OCS are marine biologists intimately familiar with the seafloor where the turbines would be. Sending cameras and other sophisticated monitoring machines 80 to 160 feet below the surface, these scientists examine the vast sand flats, some covered with sand dollars and northern star coral; the complex regions of cobbles and boulders; the lives of tiny, burrowing invertebrates; and the spawning habits of important commercial species such as cod and long-finned squid. They puzzle over the effects a wind project would have on the migration patterns of whales and other marine mammals.

Read the full article at ecoRI News

Rhode Island Herring Fishermen Encourage Supreme Court Review of NMFS’s at-Sea Monitor Rule

December 23, 2022 — Relentless Inc., Huntress Inc., and Seafreeze Fleet LLC, corporations operating in the herring fishery off the coast of New England, have filed an amicus curiae brief in support of Loper Bright Enterprises’ petition for a writ of certiorari in Loper Bright Enterprises, et al. v. Raimondo, et al. These Rhode Island small businesses urge the Supreme Court to review this case to (1) resolve the circuit split in how Chevron deference applies to agency actions under the Magnuson-Stevens Act (MSA); and (2) halt a regulation which allows the Nationalarine Fisheries Service (NMFS) to charge fishermen unlawfully for a government function Congress has not approved and apparently does not believe to be worth spending Americans’ tax dollars on. The New Civil Liberties Alliance represents amici here as parties in Relentless Inc., et al. v. U.S. Dept. of Commerce, et al., now pending in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

Rhode Island fisherman support lawsuit over federal monitors

December 19, 2022 — Last month, a group of New Jersey fishermen filed a petition to the U.S. Supreme Court asking justices to stop the federal government from making them pay for workers who gather data aboard fishing boats.

At issue is a 2020 federal rule implemented by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that requires industry-funded monitoring. The monitors go out on commercial fishing vessels to collect data that’s used to craft new regulations.

NOAA announced earlier this month, that it was suspending the program until April, citing a lack of funding for administrative costs. The fishermen want the U.S. Supreme Court to declare the agency doesn’t have the power to require fishermen to pay the monitors.

Read the full article at the Center Square

RHODE ISLAND: Revolution Wind developer to pay $3.5M to R.I. fishermen for undersea cables

December 15, 2022 — Initial tensions between Rhode Island fishermen and an offshore wind developer over the project’s cable burial plan have dissipated, eased by a $3.5 million compensation package.

The payment, as well as other mitigation efforts such as extra studies on how undersea cables impact native fish species, was incorporated into state coastal regulators’ Tuesday approval of the Revolution Wind cable burial plan. The R.I. Coastal Resources Management Council’s unanimous decision concludes a more than year-long saga of public hearings and private negotiations, focused largely on fishing industry concerns with the project.

Conflict between fishermen and offshore wind developers is not new; the groups have butted heads repeatedly as the massive wind farms work their way through federal and state reviews. That includes in Rhode Island, where the CRMC in 2021 signed off on another wind farm, South Fork Wind, over objections from fishing industry representatives.

Read the full story at Providence Business News

Vessel Speed Restrictions Proposed for New England Waters to Protect Endangered Right Whales

September 22, 2022 — Ferries and charter boats could move a lot slower in Rhode Island during the off-season if federal regulators accept new nautical speed limits to protect an endangered species of whale.

Officials with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have proposed restricting existing nautical speed limits to 10 knots per hour for all vessels greater than 35 feet in length. If approved, the new rule would go into effect between Nov. 1 and May 30 and apply to all vessels sailing along the Atlantic seaboard from Massachusetts to North Carolina – including all of Rhode Island Sound and Block Island Sound.

The rule is intended to curb the amount of vessel strikes on the Atlantic’s already limited right whale population, which is close to extinction. NOAA estimates at least four right whales have died from colliding with marine vessels since 2017.

“The biggest impact to charter boats is the loss of fishing time for our clients,” said Capt. Rick Bellavance, president of the Rhode Island Party and Charter Boat Association. “If we’re driving 10 miles an hour instead of 15, that’s 5 miles of travel every hour. It could be a half hour or an hour each day of less fishing and more driving.”

The off season isn’t quite as off it used to be. Bellavance says more and more customers charter boats to fish for tautog, also known as blackfish, which has had a resurgence thanks to careful conservation by the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management (DEM), and is almost an attraction for the state in November and December.

Read the full article Eco RI News

How a 100-turbine wind farm is about to change Newport County’s oceanfront views

September 19, 2022 — Within five years, Rhode Island’s horizon will be unmistakably altered to any beachgoer, fisherman or waterfront homeowner gazing out to sea, and the coastal Atlantic from Martha’s Vineyard to Long Island will be dotted with wind turbines arranged in orderly grids like trees in an orchard.

They will appear small in perspective, and tower in reality over the men and women who go out on boats to service them, the blades rotating to the height of an 80-story building, 873 feet high at the peak of every electricity-generating revolution.

The Revolution Wind lease, located approximately 15 miles south of Little Compton’s coastline, is the closest to Rhode Island of 10 offshore wind farms currently being developed in a huge tract of southern New England’s coastal waters.

Read the full article at the Newport Daily News

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