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Permitting for big U.S. offshore wind farm will resume ‘very, very soon’: Avangrid CEO

January 21, 2021 — The developer of the first major U.S. offshore wind farm said on Wednesday it will soon apply for a federal permit from President Joe Biden’s administration, after former President Donald Trump’s government abruptly canceled its initial application last month.

Vineyard Wind will resubmit its construction plan to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management “very very soon,” Avangrid Inc CEO Dennis Arriola said in an interview, without specifying an exact date. “We believe that the pause button is going to come off and we’re going to continue right where we were,” he said.

Biden has pledged to boost development of renewable energy as part of a sweeping plan to fight climate change and create jobs, and offshore wind proponents expect the nascent U.S. industry to experience dramatic growth.

Vineyard Wind is a joint venture between power company Avangrid, a unit of Spain’s Iberdrola, and Denmark’s Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners. Once constructed, the project 15 miles off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard is expected to provide power to more than 400,000 Massachusetts homes.

Read the full story at Reuters

Vineyard wind project officially taken off the table for now

December 17, 2020 — As far as the Trump administration is concerned, Vineyard Wind is no longer in line to be the first utility-scale offshore wind development in the United State.

The U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management officially declared Vineyard Wind’s federal permitting process “terminated” with a posting published in the federal register Wednesday.

Precisely what that means is unclear for the fate of a project that is supposed to deliver renewable energy to Massachusetts and had been in line to be the first major offshore wind farm in America.

On Dec. 1, Vineyard Wind announced that it had temporarily withdrawn its construction and operations plan from further review by BOEM, referring to it as a “pause [in] the ongoing process” that would not delay the planned start of clean power generation in 2023. But based on BOEM’s posting Wednesday, the federal government is treating the withdrawal as the end of the road, at least for now, for Vineyard Wind.

Read the full story at WWLP

Recent Offshore Wind Changes Offer Promise for Protection of Domestic Fishing

December 17, 2020 — Change is in the wind as three developments have modified the seascape for offshore wind in favor of fisheries.

Defense legislation affirming Jones Act compliance for offshore projects, a decision affecting the Massachusetts-planned Vineyard Wind project and an interior legal memo all help reinforce the importance of fisheries and domestic business when offshore wind projects are proposed.

Read the full story at Seafood News

CHRIS MCCARTHY: Is Vineyard Wind Dead or Just Playing Dead?

December 17, 2020 — The New Bedford fishing industry is celebrating the announcement that Vineyard Wind has withdrawn from the federal permitting process and the process has ended.

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, a part of the Department of the Interior, issued a statement on Tuesday, December 15, that finalizes the end of the permitting process to build an 800-megawatt wind energy turbine off of the coast of Massachusetts.

Because Vineyard Wind withdrew from the process on December 1, 2020, the permitting process “is no longer necessary and the process is hereby terminated.”

Termination of the process “is effective immediately” and that exact verbiage is used in the letter to the government by Vineyard Wind and by the government in its announcement.

Read the full story at WBSM

After Trump administration moves to pull plug, Vineyard Wind looks to Biden

December 16, 2020 — Vineyard Wind’s request for “a temporary pause” in the federal review of its 800-megawatt offshore wind energy project triggered an announcement from the Department of Interior that it must restart its entire permit application process.

In a flurry of activity by the outgoing Trump administration, the head of the Interior Department’s legal staff, solicitor Daniel H. Jorjani on Tuesday issued new guidance stressing that if Interior Secretary David Bernhardt “determines that either fishing or vessel transit constitute ‘reasonable uses…of the exclusive economic zone, the high seas and the territorial sea,’ the Secretary has a duty to prevent interference with that use.”

The 16-page memo asserts the secretary of Interior should determine “what is unreasonable” interference from offshore wind turbines “based on the perspective of the fishing user.” It’s a victory for commercial fishing advocates including the Responsible Offshore Development Alliance and Fisheries Survival Fund, who went directly to Bernhardt in July with complaints their concerns are not adequately addressed by the Bureau of Ocean Energy.

The agency had been poised to issue a record of decision Jan. 15 that would allow Vineyard Wind to proceed toward construction – a timeline that now could stretch out another 18 months, unless a Biden administration very supportive of wind energy steps in.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Recent Events Offer Promise for Protection of Sustainable Domestic Fishing

December 15, 2020– The following was released by the Responsible Offshore Development Alliance:

Three significant positive developments affecting fisheries and offshore wind have occurred since Friday. The Responsible Offshore Development Alliance (RODA) has worked on these issues to ensure the safety and continued viability of our U.S. domestic fisheries, our coastal communities, and seafood consumers in light of offshore wind energy development. These wins were not achieved through high-powered lobbying or well-financed campaigns, but rather by expressing a clear and consistent message based in science and fact, making reasonable requests, and working diligently with elected and appointed officials in the Administration, both parties in Congress, career agency officials, and a multitude of state and private sector entities.

It is reassuring to see reason and logic prevail in government decisions. In addition to the many officials who contributed to these outcomes, we are immensely thankful for the efforts made by our own members, by others in the fishing industry and its advocates, and by those conscientious members of the offshore wind industry.

The Jones Act

What happened: On Friday, the Senate passed the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act that included a version of the “Garamendi Amendment,” which clarifies that all federal laws–including the Jones Act–apply to “all installations and other devices permanently or temporarily attached to the seabed, which may be erected thereon for the purpose of exploring for, developing, or producing resources, including non-mineral energy resources.” President Trump has threatened to veto the NDAA bill, but it is considered to have a veto-proof majority in Congress.

What It Means: A frequently cited benefit of the development of offshore wind energy has been domestic job creation. But the fact is that developers have planned to survey and construct early projects using vessels, equipment, and crew from abroad, with a longer term goal of building out a U.S. supply chain. RODA has submitted comment letters and raised attention to the Jones Act’s application to the offshore wind industry to date, which differed from all other ocean activities. This new statutory language means that many of those contracts and project plans will need to be revised to use U.S. vessels and crew from the start, consistent with all other U.S. industries. Currently, there are no Jones Act qualified vessels that can transport or install offshore wind turbines. Getting the investments required to build them may be challenging, and getting installation vessels in the water will take time. However, ensuring that any economic benefits generated by offshore wind energy accrue to our manufacturers and local communities is the right thing to do.

BOEM Vineyard Wind decision

What happened: The Department of Interior has announced that the preparation of an Environmental Impact Statement for the Vineyard Wind project is no longer necessary, and the process is terminated effective immediately. In plain English, this means the federal permitting process for the Vineyard Wind project is canceled. This news will become “official” in the Federal Register on December 16th.

What it means: On December 3, just a week before a final Environmental Impact Statement of its project was to be published in the Federal Register, Vineyard Wind announced that it had “decided to temporarily withdraw its Construction and Operations Plan (COP) from further review by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM).”  BOEM responded by effectively stating that there is no “pause” option in the regulations, and accordingly “there is no longer a proposal for a major federal action awaiting technical and environmental review, nor is there a decision pending before BOEM,” and the process is “terminated.” RODA and local fishing interests repeatedly requested that Vineyard Wind, neighboring wind leaseholders, the states, BOEM, and USCG modify project designs to lessen impacts to the fishing industry. This led to a re-orientation of planned turbine rows in the dominant fishing direction, but other critical issues such as the addition of transit lanes for the safety of ocean-going fishing vessels were ignored. Now, Vineyard Wind will need to re-apply for its project, but the new timeline may not match supply contracts or the power purchase agreement with Massachusetts.

Department of the Interior internal legal memorandum

What happened: The Department of the Interior (DOI) issued an internal legal memorandum interpreting its statutory mandate to prevent offshore wind energy’s interference with fishing. Previous DOI guidance on the statutory language, which requires “prevention of interference with reasonable uses [including fishing] of the exclusive economic zone, the high seas, and the territorial seas,” indicated that offshore renewable energy projects could not interfere with the legal right to fish. This new memo explicitly changes that guidance, saying “[n]owhere does the statute indicate that the Secretary is only to prevent interference with the legal right to navigate or fish in an area. It is the Secretary’s job to provide for the prevention of interference with those uses.” In short, it states: (1) That the Secretary must ensure that offshore wind energy projects do not unreasonably interfere with fishing operations; (2) That fishermen’s perspectives are part of what determine whether interference is unreasonable; (3) That such interference is considered on a cumulative instead of project-specific level; and (4) If in question it must err on the side of less interference rather than more.

What It Means: This fundamentally shifts the balance of interests toward fishing, a critical provider of food security and low-carbon footprint protein, over offshore wind energy. Under previous guidance the presumption was that wind energy development should take precedence, and proceed in accordance with what developers determined to be optimal, and fishing interests would need to adjust. While a future Administration could revoke or refine the memorandum, it presents a solid legal argument for challenging any such action.

What does the future hold?

These three recent events create a better opportunity for a future in which the interests of all reasonable users of the seas can coexist.

When the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act becomes law, and projects must comply with the Jones Act, this will create a delay in the timeline for construction. It is crucial that the incoming Administration and interested states use that time to invest in science and research to understand—and ultimately minimize—environmental and economic impacts.

  • We need to start collecting robust baseline data immediately in all places where offshore wind projects may be considered in the future.
  • We need to retool our fisheries and protected resource monitoring protocols so important ecological data that forms the basis of fisheries management is not disrupted.
  • We need to understand the environmental impacts that have occurred from rapid large-scale development of offshore wind in places like Europe, which the European Parliament is currently reviewing and finding are largely unknown and possibly much greater than anticipated.
  • We need to understand the variations between the ocean and atmospheric environments of the European installations, and significantly different environments of U.S. federal waters, which are unique and contain some of the most productive and ecologically complex benthic environments in the world.
  • We need to much better understand the economic interactions between the two industries so we can preserve and promote traditional, historic, and sustainable fishing, while also identifying any possible economic opportunities that may arise for fishing communities from offshore wind energy production when it arrives in the future.
  • We need to continue to improve offshore wind energy and other renewable technology, including turbine and cable recycling methods, so that we can thoughtfully and quickly reduce carbon emissions while avoiding serious adverse environmental consequences associated with the large land use and materials needs of current technology.
  • We need to prioritize development of regional transmission systems to minimize the amount of structure that is ultimately placed in the water and on or under the seabed.
  • We need to build better relationships between fishermen, offshore wind energy developers, states, and federal managers so that information is effectively communicated and innovative solutions can be identified.
  • We need to develop decommissioning plans for when offshore wind leases are over that properly mitigate long-term environmental impacts and restore impacted habitats so we don’t create permanent steel graveyards in the ocean.

Most importantly, now that we’ve witnessed a project’s plans collapse due to failure to minimize fisheries impacts, we must work together to improve our planning process — as we in the fishing industry have been requesting for over a decade. Fishermen must be at the table and play a meaningful role in project siting and design. Ways to minimize and mitigate impacts must be identified up front and fully incorporated into all project plans. Although a handful of states and developers have made strong efforts to operate this way, it has never been done effectively on the correct spatial scale. In fact, we need to create new public, transparent, and inclusive regional processes that fully incorporate fisheries science and operational knowledge.

The need for a new planning process has been recognized by fishing interests and by offshore wind energy advocates. This was most recently clearly stated in a December 11th interview by Jeffrey Grybowski, the former CEO of Deepwater Wind, which was acquired by Ørsted in 2019.

“Obviously there are fishing groups in the Northeast that have raised really significant concerns. Those concerns can be addressed, but I also acknowledge they were real concerns. I don’t think anyone is suggesting their concerns should’ve been dismissed and projects just should have been approved.”

Mr. Grybowski went on to note that the problems with Vineyard Wind were not due to political bias.

“…some have said Vineyard Wind’s permit delays are due to some kind of anti-renewable bias within the administration. I disagree with the idea that — I think that view diminishes the nuance and complexity of what we’re all doing. New lease areas are complicated. There are stakeholders out there in favor of new lease areas. And so to simply blame everything on a political viewpoint understates the nuance and complexity of what we’re trying to do.”

The need for change has now been made clear by officials on both sides of the political aisle. Speaking at his annual climate change conference, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) stated

“Right from the very get-go, even before the filing … it should be a requirement of the filing to bring a statement of what work you’ve done with the fishing community, what their concerns have been. … Developers shouldn’t just get to go out there, cut a private deal with their funders, their investors, and then put their stamp down in the public ocean as if they owned it.”

These recent developments will significantly shift the discourse around offshore wind and fisheries to make sure fishermen’s needs and knowledge are afforded greater priority. Taken together, they offer a significant opportunity to fix the broken offshore wind energy planning process. Regardless of political or industry affiliation, we must now work together to properly balance uses of the ocean commons and maintain sustainable fishing practices.

Vineyard Wind project stalls, Maine begins information meetings on its own wind project

December 15, 2020 — The Vineyard Wind project, a proposed 800-megawatt offshore wind energy installation, has been stalled as the company – Vineyard Wind LLC – withdrew its construction and operations plan from review by the Bureau of Ocean and Energy Management (BOEM), on 1 December, effectively halting the project’s progress.

The withdrawal, announced in a letter to be published in the Federal Register on 16 December, is a win for the region’s fishing industry, which has objected to the project in addition to other proposed projects in the New England area. Fishermen have been worried about the proposed wind projects for years, and two groups representing fisheries in the region – the Fisheries Survival Fund and the Responsible Offshore Development Alliance (RODA) – have made layout suggestions, requested revisions to an earlier Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), and have pushed for a pause on development amid the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

New Tool Available to Explore Effects of Offshore Wind on Fisheries

December 8, 2020 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

Factors to Consider

In a busy ocean, finding the right spot for offshore wind farms isn’t easy. There are a lot of factors to consider besides the windiest spots.

  • What marine life is in the proposed areas?
  • Is the area a productive scallop ground or other important fishing spot?
  • Do endangered whales or sea turtles rely on this area for food or migration?
  • Will fishermen and other vessel traffic be able to navigate safely?

Currently, there are more than 16 offshore wind energy areas in various stages of planning and development from Maine through North Carolina. These projects may install more than 2,100 turbines from 2021–2029.

New Online Tools

To help better understand the impacts offshore wind development will have on Atlantic coast fisheries, we developed some new tools and analyses.

Some of the information you can find for the currently proposed offshore wind energy areas includes:

  • Amount of individual species landed
  • Landings revenue
  • Gear types used
  • Number of vessels fishing
  • Number of fishing trips
  • Communities affected

To gather this information, we combined vessel logbooks, dealer reports, and observer data to come up with fishing footprints. We then compared them to the proposed offshore wind energy project areas.

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is the federal agency responsible for reviewing and permitting offshore energy projects. It has used this information in its analysis of the Vineyard Wind Project.

Anyone can download the data and generate summary reports using our query tool.

We will further develop these tools based on public input and ongoing efforts to integrate other data sources.Both the summary reports and underlying data will be continuously updated as we obtain this additional information. We are currently working on integrating party/charter vessel logbook data and data from vessels that fish for highly migratory species and for species managed in the South Atlantic. Learn more about the work we’re doing to monitor and analyze the potential fishery impacts from offshore wind development.

Questions?

Fisheries Data: Benjamin Galuardi, Regional Office, (978) 281-9187

Offshore Wind and Fisheries: Doug Christel, Regional Office, (978) 281-9141

Vineyard Wind pauses U.S. permitting over switch to GE turbines

December 3, 2020 — Vineyard Wind, which is developing the first major U.S. offshore wind farm, has temporarily withdrawn the project from the federal permitting process so the company can incorporate turbines from a new supplier, General Electric Co, in its design.

The move, which requires a technical review that will last several weeks, will almost certainly delay a federal decision over whether to approve the project until after President-elect Joe Biden takes office on Jan. 20.

Calling the decision to pause the permitting process “difficult,” Vineyard Wind Chief Executive Lars Pedersen said in a statement issued on Tuesday that he hoped it would help avoid further delays.

Read the full story at Reuters

Vineyard Wind will use GE turbines for its massive project off Martha’s Vineyard

December 2, 2020 — Vineyard Wind LLC said Tuesday that it has picked General Electric to provide the turbines for what would be the first large-scale offshore wind farm in the United States, a major step forward for the long-delayed project.

The wind farm developer, a joint venture owned by Avangrid and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, had originally planned to install turbines from the manufacturer MHI Vestas in waters about 15 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard.

But the federal permitting delays that have beset the $3 billion project and the expiration of a contract with MHI Vestas prompted Vineyard Wind to reimagine the layout of the wind farm. Instead of 84 towers, Vineyard Wind’s first project will consist of 62 of Boston-based GE’s Haliade-X towers, the most powerful offshore-wind turbines on the market.

Read the full story at The Boston Globe

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