July 2, 2019 — Dominion Energy Inc. began work to install cables for a wind farm in the Atlantic Ocean near Virginia, marking the start of construction on the second such facility off the U.S. coast.
The Richmond, Virginia-based utility owner is working with Denmark’s Orsted A/S to install the two 6-megawatt turbines 27 miles (43 kilometers) east of Virginia Beach. They’re expected to start producing power for up to 3,000 homes next year, according to a statement Monday.
March 14, 2019 — On a blustery winter afternoon off the coast of Virginia Beach, people are pressing forward on the bow of the Virginia Aquarium and Marine Science Center’s whale watching boat as a dorsal fin breaks the surface. Cameras click in staccato for a second or two before the humpback whale dives to feed again.
The relatively small dorsal fin belies the humpback’s size. Calves weigh about a ton. Adults can grow heavier than a yellow school bus loaded with kindergarten students. Few things that swim in the sea can break their bones.
A mile to the north, however, by the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, a massive cargo ship is pushing south toward the whales. On this Saturday in late January, these humpbacks are swimming in traffic in the shipping channel that leads vessels to and from some of America’s busiest ports. These shipping vessels are one of the few true physical threats to humpback whales.
“Those big ships, they’re churning up the water and the fish are coming through and that’s what the whales are going for,” says Mark Sedaca, captain of the 65-foot Atlantic Explorer on this whale watching trip.
February 5, 2019 — The following was released by the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council:
The public is invited to attend the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council’s meeting to be held March 6-7, 2019 at the Hilton Virginia Beach Oceanfront (3001 Atlantic Avenue, Virginia Beach, VA 23451, Telephone 757-213-3000).
Meeting Materials: Briefing documents will be posted at http://ww.mafmc.org/briefing/march-2019 as they become available.
Public Comments: Written comments must be received by 11:59 p.m. on February 20, 2019 to be included in the briefing book. Comments received after this date but before 5:00 p.m. on February 28, 2019 will be posted as supplemental materials on the Council meeting web page. After that date, all comments must be submitted using an online comment form available at available at http://www.mafmc.org/public-comment.
Webinar: For online access to the meeting, enter as a guest at: http://mafmc.adobeconnect.com/march2019.
Agenda: Click here for a detailed meeting agenda.
January 22, 2019 — The following was released by the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council:
The February 2019 meeting of the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council has been cancelled due to the government shutdown. The Council is considering rescheduling some of the planned agenda items for a shorter meeting tentatively scheduled for March 6 and 7 in Virginia Beach. However, feasibility of this option is highly dependent on when the government reopens. For additional information, please contact Chris Moore (cmoore@mafmc.org, 302-526-5255).
Please note that a number of committee and advisory panel meetings have also been cancelled as a result of the shutdown. Updates about cancellations and rescheduled meeting dates are being posted on an ongoing basis at http://www.mafmc.org/newsfeed/2019/federal-shutdown-effects-on-mafmc-meetings.
December 7, 2018 — When the Trump administration OK’d seismic testing along the Atlantic coast to explore the possibilities of offshore drilling, business owners in Virginia’s largest city condemned the approval and scrambled to plan how to oppose it.
The exploration carries risks, such as damage to marine life and Virginia’s coasts, and could threaten the tourism and fishing industries, the port of Hampton Roads and even the military, opponents here said.
Laura Habr is co-owner of Croc’s 19th Street Bistro in the ViBe District and a founding board member of the Business Alliance for Protecting the Atlantic Coast, an organization that represents roughly 43,000 businesses and 500,000 commercial fishing families from Maine to Florida.
For her, the next several days will be filled with meetings and conference calls, where a community on high alert will work to decide how to push back against the decision.
Read the full story at The Virginia-Pilot
October 10, 2018 — Dominion Energy Inc.’s request to build a modestly sized — though less modestly priced — wind farm goes before regulators today, as evidentiary hearings begin on the two-turbine, $300 million Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project.
If all goes as planned, the project would come online in 2020, becoming the nation’s second offshore wind farm and the first to go up in federal waters.
Sited 27 miles off the coast of Virginia Beach, the turbines would add 12 megawatts of capacity to the state’s grid. But Dominion, along with its industry allies and Virginia officials, see the demonstration as a steppingstone to the state’s new goal of developing 2 gigawatts by 2028.
“[T]he project needs to be built and studied to determine how the technology works and performs in the Atlantic Ocean 27 miles off the coast, and in potential hurricane force winds,” said David Botkins, a spokesman for the company, which is partnering with Denmark-based Ørsted Energy A/S on the project.
Andy Geissbuehler, advisory director at renewable consultancy BVG Associates, agreed.
“One of the basics in launching the offshore wind industry in the U.S. is transferring the experience from Europe,” he said. “But there are limitations to how much of that experience can be transferred.”
Signed, sealed, delivered?
This week’s hearings at the State Corporation Commission come after a preliminary session Thursday, when lawyers for environmentalists, Dominion and the attorney general’s office attempted to reassure the SCC’s three commissioners that they still enjoyed some semblance of authority over the project.
Read the full story at E&E News
February 8, 2018 — Leaders want the local coastline taken off a newly expanded list of places open for offshore drilling.
City Council members approved a resolution Tuesday reiterating the city’s opposition to offshore drilling. It also asks for congressional representatives to help secure the same promise from the federal government as Florida, which was assured that it would be “off the table” for drilling.
The White House proposed a five-year offshore leasing program last month that would open most of the East Coast to drilling. The plan isn’t final, and a public hearing will be held in Richmond Feb. 21.
Read the full story at the Virginian-Pilot
December 19, 2016 — For more than a year, the Virginia Aquarium & Marine Science Center built a case for naming a vast canyon in the Atlantic the next national marine sanctuary. There were dozens of meetings held, hundreds of letters written and thousands of signatures gathered from supporters on a petition.
Suddenly and quietly last month, however, an aquarium task force that had been pushing to make the Norfolk Canyon a sanctuary put everything on hold indefinitely.
To make a long story short, what happened was Donald Trump.
The Republican presidential candidate was elected, and the chances for a lot of conservation initiatives suddenly looked much iffier.
“We’re not really sure where this new administration is going to go with environmental protection,” said Mark Swingle, the Virginia Beach aquarium’s director of research and conservation. “The timing just doesn’t look right now. So we just decided to take a pause here to see what’s going to happen.”
Trump has said he favors oil and gas drilling in the Atlantic – something that would be prohibited in and around the 35-mile-long canyon if it were declared a sanctuary. He also has promised to roll back government regulations, particularly those of environmental agencies.
In general, he’s positioned himself to be a president whose administration will be much harder to persuade on environmental initiatives than that of President Barack Obama.
That could make it tougher to build a consensus for widening the government’s protective reach, whether it’s on land or 70 miles out in the Atlantic, where the Norfolk Canyon begins.
“We really did not want to push through this process right now with the uncertainty on whether we’d have the broad type of support we wanted,” Swingle said.
December 12, 2016 — Working waterfronts in coastal Virginia are under increasing threats from sea-level rise, subsidence and loss of marine habitat. And the desire to live on the water sometimes clashes with the tradition of working the water.
Earlier this year, Virginia Beach oyster farmers made headlines when they were confronted by waterfront property owners over the number of cages they were putting down in waters used not only commercially but for recreation.
And it’s not an urban problem. Homeowners on the western branch of the Corrotoman River in rural Lancaster County are challenging aquaculture applications there and applying for riparian rights in an effort to block new farms.
“It’s the same as Virginia Beach on a much smaller scale,” said Ben Stagg, who manages shellfish leases for the state. “It’s the same argument: ‘We don’t want somebody right outside our door. We use this area, our kids swim out here, we don’t want a bunch of cages.’ This issue is percolating up statewide.”
Now, after four years of collaboration, working waterfront stakeholders from the Eastern Shore to the Northern Neck have come up with ways to alleviate conflict and to preserve Virginia’s nearly 600 working waterfronts and their commercial fishing heritage.
Of those, 123 are located in the four counties of the Northern Neck. That includes one of Virginia’s oldest and largest industry, Omega Protein Inc.’s menhaden fishing operation in Reedville, which contributes about $88 million to the state’s economy.
August 22, 2016 — VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. — G. Warren Elliott of Chambersburg has been elected vice-chairman of the Mid Atlantic Fishery Management Council.
The council is responsible for the management of marine fisheries in the United States waters from three to 200 miles offshore from New York to North Carolina.
Elliott was appointed to the council by the U.S. Secretary of Commerce in 2010 and is serving his second term.
Elliott chaired the Ecosystem and Ocean Planning Committee for five years, and led the effort to protect deep sea corals across 39,000 square miles, the single largest protected area in the Atlantic Ocean.
“Warren Elliott has quietly established himself as a leader in ocean issues and policy, and I cannot think of anyone better to succeed me,” said outgoing vice-chairman Dr. Lee Anderson of Delaware.
Anderson was an original member of the council’s Scientific and Statistical Committee organized in 1978. He is a professor in the School of Marine Science and Policy at the University of Delaware.
The 25-member fishery council develops fishery management plans and measures – such as quotas, seasons and closed areas – for 13 species of fish and shellfish, including bluefish, summer flounder, black sea bass, surfclams, ocean quahogs and monkfish.