Saving Seafood

RHODE ISLAND: 4 hours not enough for vote on Revolution Wind proposal in R.I.

April 25, 2023 — People have a lot to say about the Revolution Wind offshore wind project proposal.

In fact, they have so much to say that even after a four-hour meeting Tuesday night, the Rhode Island Coastal Resources Management Council had to adjourn instead of voting on whether the agency should sign off on the proposal. The room in a Department of Administration building in Providence was only available until about 10 p.m., and as the clock neared that hour, the chair of the CRMC asked how many more people wanted to speak. At least a half-dozen hands shot up.

Instead of continuing to push it, the council set a new date: May 9. Public input will pick back up then.

CRMC had heard from the developer, from an advisory board for fishers who are concerned about the project and say more needs to be done to accommodate for the effects on their way of life, and then from members of the public on both sides of the divide before the meeting ended.

Revolution Wind would bring 400 megawatts of power to Rhode Island and 304 to Connecticut, the first utility-scale project to bring power directly to Rhode Island. Though it’s in federal waters, the CRMC has the authority to certify whether the project is consistent with its coastal policies, a crucial part of the regulatory process that will also have to go to the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.

The developers have proposed a nearly $13 million fund to compensate for potential effects on fishers, which could be boosted by as much as $5 million if the effects are worse than thought. If the effects are less than thought, the developer would recoup up to $2.5 million.

Advocates said the proposal is necessary as Rhode Island tries to confront climate change, while the Fishermen’s Advisory Board, an internal panel that advises the CRMC, asked for additional mitigation measures.

Read the full article at the Boston Globe

RHODE ISLAND: Fisheries Council recommends allowing more Atlantic menhaden fishing in Bay

April 8, 2023 — The Rhode Island Marine Fisheries Council voted Monday to recommend allowing commercial fishermen to harvest 50,000 pounds of Atlantic menhaden per vessel per week, despite the Bay possibly being closed to fishing because the population may be below Menhaden Management Area program threshold levels.

The 4-3 vote occurred despite a state Marine Fisheries Division staff recommendation for more study. When the Bay is open under the MMA program, 120,000 pounds/vessel/day are allowed to be harvested.

The MMA program uses ecosystem-based management approaches to ensure there are enough Atlantic menhaden left in the water to serve as food for striped bass, bluefish, tuna, dolphin, whales, osprey and other animals.

Read the full article at The Providence Journal 

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