Saving Seafood

RHODE ISLAND: This major offshore wind company just announced a big Providence expansion

September 3, 2024 — The Danish offshore wind developer that owns America’s first offshore wind farm and is building a second, much larger wind project off the Rhode Island coast is expanding its presence in the Ocean State.

Ørsted is moving its office in Providence, one of two co-headquarters for the company’s U.S. operations, into a new 17,470-square-foot space at 500 Exchange St. to accommodate a growing staff that is expected to more than double in the next few years.

The move from a smaller Exchange Terrace office comes not only as the company moves ahead with construction of Revolution Wind, a 65-turbine wind farm on which it is partnering with utility Eversource, but also just before the announcement of a decision that could see its investment in Southern New England grow even larger.

Read the full article at the Providence Journal

RHODE ISLAND: How a Newport advisory commission ended up a part of the anti-offshore wind controversy

September 3, 2024 — One of the city’s volunteer advisory commissions was accused of censorship after denying an offer to put opponents of current offshore wind farm projects as experts on a series of educational panels on climate change and offshore wind.

While offshore wind opponents, including Councilor David Carlin, argued that the educational panel’s lack of offshore wind opponents made the series unbalanced and unfair, Carlin’s resolution to sponsor a panel of anti-offshore wind speakers was shot down by the rest of City Council for being outside the council’s jurisdiction.

In a statement regarding the response from the community and Carlin’s resolution, the commission said the events were designed to be “educational and informational” engagements with experts from their field, not a debate or public hearing.

Read the full article at The Newport Daily News

Fishermen stage floating protest at Vineyard Wind site

August 27, 2024 — As concerns mount over the July collapse of one Vineyard Wind turbine blade, a “flotilla” of about two dozen commercial and recreational fishing vessels steamed to the wind farm on Sunday to protest offshore wind development and its impact on the marine ecosystem.

The vessels, hoisting anti-offshore wind flags and blasting air horns, departed early Sunday morning from ports in New Bedford, Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, Rhode Island and along the Cape, converging at about noon on the site of the crippled Vineyard Wind turbine.

“The blade collapse was an eye-opener to a lot of people who before didn’t know that offshore wind is a disaster for the ocean,” said Shawn Machie, 54, who is captain of the New Bedford scalloper F/V Capt. John.

On July 13, one of the three blades on turbine AW38 sustained damage while undergoing testing. Five days later, a 300-foot section of the blade collapsed into the water leaving fiberglass debris floating in fishing grounds and scattered across beaches, mostly on Nantucket. It marked an inflection point as the first industrial energy incident in this era of offshore wind development in waters off the Northeast coast.

Read the full story at The New Bedford Light

Fishermen organizing ‘flotilla’ protest against offshore wind

August 23, 2024 — In response to recent concerns over offshore wind and with debris washing up on Nantucket and Island beaches from a fractured turbine blade, the New England Fisherman’s Stewardship Association (NEFSA) has organized a “flotilla” for this Sunday, bringing fishing boats together to peacefully protest in unison against the offshore wind industry.

Boats will be joining together in a “boat parade” from various areas of the east coast, said NEFSA founder and CEO Jerry Leeman, including the Vineyard, Nantucket, parts of Massachusetts, Rhode Island and potentially New Jersey.

Read the full article at MV Times

MASSACHUSETTS: Final Offshore Wind Discussion Centers on Ethics, Economics

August 23, 2024 — Newport’s Energy & Environ­ment Commission concluded its three-part series about offshore wind on Aug. 15, with moderator Avery Robertson leading panelists representing Climate Action Rhode Island’s Yes to Wind campaign, the Iron Workers Local 37 union, and the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management in a discussion about the ethics and economics of offshore wind devel­opment.

Nick Horton, a volunteer with Cli­mate Action Rhode Island, opened his remarks by asking the audience to raise their hands if they con­sidered themselves environmen­talists, whether they cared about whales, and if they cared about the health of Rhode Island’s fisheries now and in the future. Most people raised their hands to all three. He then asked the room to raise their hands if they planned on cutting their personal energy usage by 90 percent within the next few years. Nobody raised their hand.

He proceeded to make the point that Rhode Island’s grid is largely dependent upon the fracking of natural gas in other states as its main power source. Horton said he supports the industrial scale devel­opment of offshore wind not only because it provides an alternative to modes of fossil fuel production, such as fracking, which negatively impact the environment, but also because the pollution caused by fracking and coal-fired power plants increases cancer rates and other health issues in other com­munities.

Read the full article at Newport Daily News

RHODE ISLAND: New commercial fishing pier opens in Port of Galilee

July 15, 2024 — The fishing industry is seeing progress towards a promising future.

Rhode Island Governor Dan McKee announced a major contribution to a newly completed commercial fishing pier in the Port of Galilee on Tuesday.

“The fishing industry is an important part of our economy,” McKee said.

According to the Governor, Rhode Island is ranked fourth in terms of fishing value on the East Coast and 18th in the country.

According to Rhode Island’s Department of Environmental Management, Galilee is the home port of 240 fishing vessels and crews.

Read the full article at ABC 6

US states of Maine, Rhode Island fund efforts to market seafood

June 12, 2024 — The governments of the U.S. states of Maine and Rhode Island are providing grant funding to help promote and market the states’ seafood – adding to growing efforts to create marketing bodies promoting seafood consumption.

A grant from the Maine Department of Economic and Community Development’s Domestic Trade Grant Program – which was funded by the Maine Jobs & Recovery Plan signed by Maine Governor Janet Mills and the American Rescue Plan Act signed by U.S. President Joe Biden – will help establish a new Maine Seafood Promotional Council. The council, which is being led by FocusMaine and guided by input from the seafood industry, recently launched and is gearing up for a two-year pilot phase, FocusMaine said in a press release.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Long-term ocean sampling in Narragansett Bay reveals plummeting plankton levels: impact uncertain for local food web

May 16, 2024 — URI researchers estimate that in Narragansett Bay, the level of tiny plantlike creatures called phytoplankton has dropped by half in the last half century, based on new analysis of a long-term time series study of the bay.

That’s what a new paper published by the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography (GSO) reports — news, recently uncovered, that is both surprising and concerning.

Analyzing the full time series of the bay, the research team found that phytoplankton biomass in Narragansett Bay declined by a stunning 49% from 1968 to 2019. The intensity of the winter-spring bloom, which starts the annual cycle of productivity in the Bay, decreased over time and is also occurring earlier each year.

URI’s new study in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) shares information from one of the longest plankton time series in the world. The subject of study is not only a destination for generations of Rhode Islanders and tourists but a fruitful site of research for oceanographers at URI’s Narragansett Bay Campus.

“A lot of people live, work and play on the shores of Narragansett Bay,” Oceanography Professor Tatiana Rynearson says, providing key goods and services for the nearly 2 million people who inhabit its watershed. Even in the dense Northeast, Narragansett Bay stands out as a well-used body of water. The bay sits between regions of cold winters and warm summers, Arctic waters to the north and warm waters to the south, existing at a bit of a scientific sweet spot that offers researchers a dynamic environment to study.

Read the full article at the The University of Rhode Island

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