Saving Seafood

NEW YORK: Biden Administration Nixes Hamptons Offshore Wind Sites Near Beaches, Fishing Grounds

April 20, 2021 — The Biden administration announced that it will not lease two offshore wind areas off the Hamptons. The leasing areas were controversial to eastern Long Island residents and the commercial fishing industry.

The Fairways North and Fairways South sites were planned just 15 miles off the coast.

Southampton Town Supervisor Jay Schneiderman says the 800-foot-tall turbines would be a visual eyesore for public and private Hamptons beachgoers — which the state of New York relies on for billions in tourism dollars.

“I believe in [offshore wind],” Schneiderman said, “just site it further out. There’s no reason why they can’t go deeper, into deeper waters, you know, manage the visual impact.”

And 1,700 members of the fishing industry sent a letter to the Biden administration to say the construction and the operation of the turbines would starve them of prime fishing grounds. Bonnie Brady with Long Island Commercial Fishing Association has sent these letters before.

“Let’s face it,” she said. “I’ve been fighting on this issue for fishermen to get a true seat at the table, not be served for lunch, for 20 years.”

Read the full story at WSHU

NEW JERSEY: Residents, officials reiterate concerns about wind farm off Atlantic City

April 19, 2021 — Rick Robinson likens the idea of building up to 98 wind turbines on the ocean horizon to placing them on the rim of the Grand Canyon. The Seven Mile Island homeowner was among numerous people who spoke this week at a federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management virtual hearing on a proposed wind farm 15 miles off Atlantic City.

In addition to ruining a magnificent view, the 850-foot turbines will endanger wildlife, scar coastal land, scare away fish, interfere with shipping operations and raise electric bills, according to about 20 speakers in opposition.

Others at the hearing spoke in favor of the Ocean Wind farm. They touted wind energy as a way to bring abundant and clean energy to New Jersey, while helping fight climate change and creating jobs.

“Rather than continue down the path toward catastrophic sea level rise and flooding,” said Hayley Berliner of Environment New Jersey, “we can instead start to mitigate that by replacing our fossil-fuel power with clean, renewable offshore wind power.”

Read the full story at The Press of Atlantic City

N.J. fishing groups worry offshore wind will adversely affect their industry: ‘This is our farmland’

April 19, 2021 — Capt. Hank Lackner docked a 100-foot trawler in Cape May on a recent day after unloading a catch of squid that might end up as calamari on someone’s plate just about anywhere in the United States.

Lackner fears that offshore wind farms coming to the waters off the New Jersey coast in the next few years could threaten his business. Other commercial and recreational anglers, along with the Recreational Fishing Alliance (RFA), a political action organization, share his concerns.

They worry that wind farms with their soaring turbines could disrupt fish habitat, reroute fishing lanes, and force sport anglers farther out to sea.

Lackner, of Montauk, N.Y., believes that the farms will narrow the currently wide-open pathways to the vessel he docks at Cape May so often that he calls it his second home.

“We have no power,” said Jeff Reichle, chairman of Lund’s Fisheries, a processor of scallops and squid in Cape May that employees 300. “We’re being bulldozed here. It’s just being rammed down our throats.”

He also has attended meetings, and concludes the wind industry and its government backers have all the clout.

Reichle said he is not opposed to offshore wind and was part of a group called Fisherman’s Energy that tried to install five turbines a few miles off the coast of Atlantic City. He said that project, had it succeeded, might have generated data that could have shown potential impact on marine life.

Read the full story at The Philadelphia Inquirer

US Interior Department reverses legal opinion on offshore wind

April 16, 2021 — The U.S. Interior Department formally reversed a Trump-era legal opinion on offshore wind energy, in another step toward the Biden administration’s goal of dramatically expanding the industry in U.S. waters.

A memo from Robert Anderson, the department’s principle deputy solicitor, released on 9 April critiques and reverses findings written in December by Daniel Jorjani, who was the department’s top lawyer when then-Interior Secretary David Bernhardt moved to shut down the approval process for the Vineyard Wind offshore project.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

BOEM pulls two areas from New York Bight wind planning

April 16, 2021 — Federal energy planners dropped two areas near Long Island from immediate consideration for offshore wind energy leases, citing potential conflicts with maritime traffic, fishing and seaside views from exclusive New York beach resorts.

The Fairways North and Fairways South areas, named for nearby shipping approaches to New York Harbor, were also seen as less attractive to wind developers for their smaller power potential. Removing them from Bureau of Ocean Energy Management planning still leaves more than 627,000 additional acres in the region available for future lease sales.

New York State officials recommended against planning for leases in the Fairway areas, saying the closest 15-mile proximity to Long Island runs counter to the state’s policy of keeping wind generation at least 18 miles from shore.

The BOEM decision came as the agency commenced online meetings of its New York Bight task force, including federal, state and local government representatives and other stakeholders.

One prominent group not in virtual attendance Wednesday was the Responsible Offshore Development Alliance, a coalition of fishing groups and communities. The group has been meeting for years with BOEM planners and wind developers, but in recent weeks reacted with alarm to the Biden administration’s full-court press to expand the industry.

Read the full story at WorkBoat

NEW JERSEY: Offshore wind power lines: Buried under Island Beach State Park, hooking into Oyster Creek

April 15, 2021 — The developer of New Jersey’s first offshore wind farm plans to run the project’s power lines under Island Beach State Park, across Barnegat Bay and connect to the electrical grid at the former Oyster Creek nuclear plant, according to plans submitted to the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.

Ørsted, the Danish power company that is proposing to build 98 wind turbines southwest of Atlantic City, has applied to the bureau to construct an offshore wind farm powerful enough to supply electricity to half a million homes.

If approved, wind farm construction would involve tunneling under Island Beach State Park and laying power lines under the auxiliary parking lot of Swimming Area 2. From there, the power lines would run southwest under the bottom of Barnegat Bay and connect to the grid at the former Oyster Creek nuclear power plant, which ceased generating electricity in 2019.

Read the full story at the Asbury Park Press

NEW YORK: Latest Hamptons Offshore Wind Farm Idea Shelved

April 15, 2021 — A heavily disputed plan to build a wind farm off the coast of the Hamptons is no longer under consideration, federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) officials said on Wednesday.

Two weeks after the agency first announced the plan to create five new offshore wind farm development zones in the Atlantic Ocean between New York and New Jersey, officials pulled the plug on two of the zones closest to Long Island — Fairways North, off the coast of the Shinnecock Inlet, and Fairways South, off Fire Island.

The two zones “will not be considered for leasing at this stage,” Luke Feinberg, project manager for BOEM, said during an online task force meeting on the proposed zones, citing issues with commercial fisheries.

Commercial fishing groups had opposed the wind farms on the grounds that it will interfere with their ability to make a living. New York State Energy Research and Development Authority officials also opposed the Fairways zones.

“I think we have some challenges that we have identified in the Fairway sites both in the relative size and distance from the shore,” Gregory Lampman, program manager for environmental research at NYSERDA, said during the meeting. “We’ve been pretty clear, and we want to make sure the projects are more than 18 miles from shore. And they fall at 15.”

Read the full story at Dan’s Papers

New Jersey offshore wind to connect at 2 former power plants onshore

April 12, 2021 — A large offshore wind energy project planned off the coast of New Jersey will connect onshore to two former power plants, and cables will run under two of the state’s most popular beaches, officials said Tuesday.

At a virtual public hearing on the Ocean Wind project planned by Orsted, the Danish wind energy developer, and PSEG, a New Jersey utility company, officials revealed that the project would connect to the electric grid at decommissioned power plants in Ocean and Cape May Counties.

The northern connection would be at the former Oyster Creek nuclear power plant in Lacey Township; the southern connection would be at the former B.L. England plant in Upper Township.

Cables running from the wind farm, to be located between 15 and 27 miles (24 to 43 kilometers) off the coast of Atlantic City, would come ashore at one of three potential locations in Ocean City: 5th Street, 13th Street or 35th Street. They would then run under the roadway along Roosevelt Boulevard out to Upper Township and the former power plant, which closed in 2019.

Scot Mackey, of the Garden State Seafood Association, said the fishing community’s input was not incorporated into final plans for the project.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at ABC News

Biden banks on offshore wind to help curb climate change

April 13, 2021 — Two wind turbines, each as tall as the Washington Monument, stand sentinel 27 miles off the coast of Virginia, the nation’s first offshore wind installation in federal waters.

The pilot project began producing power last October but is just the beginning for an industry poised for massive growth over the next decade. Longtime conflicts with the fishing industry remain, as well as some landowners, but with the help of a major push from the Biden administration, offshore wind may finally advance in the Atlantic.

Dominion Energy, Virginia’s state utility, plans to install nearly 200 more ocean turbines east of Cape Henry over the next five years. And developers have permits pending for 10 more offshore wind projects along the East Coast, from North Carolina to Maine.

The Biden administration wants to buoy the industry. Last month, the administration announced a $3 billion plan to expand offshore wind.

The ambitious goal is to generate 30 gigawatts of offshore wind power by the end of the decade, enough to power more than 10 million homes and cut 78 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions. That’s roughly the carbon equivalent of taking 17 million cars off the road for a year.

Offshore wind represents an opportunity for the Biden administration to address two major goals: reducing carbon emissions and creating jobs.

“Nowhere is the scale of that opportunity clearer than for offshore wind,” National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy said in announcing the new plan.

The projects could support tens of thousands of jobs, from maintenance at sea to steel production far inland.

There is just one other offshore wind project currently online in the United States: five turbines in state waters off the coast of Block Island, R.I.

The industry has more proposals in the works, including:

“This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity,” said Laura Morton of the American Clean Power Association, an industry group. “We can provide clean energy, slash carbon emissions and create jobs.”

Read the full story at The Maine Beacon

Biden’s Big Bet On Offshore Wind

April 12, 2021 — The Biden administration recently announced a plan to substantially expand the use of offshore wind power along the East Coast, aiming to tap a huge new source of clean energy that is likely to gain widespread acceptance in the United States.

The bold bet would result in the generation of 30 gigawatts (GW) of wind power by 2030, enough to power over 10 million homes and cut 78 million metrics tons of CO2 emissions. Currently, the United States has only one offshore wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island generating 30 megawatts (MW) — 1,000 MW are in one GW.

Offshore wind farming represents a significant opportunity for the creation of “green-collar” jobs, with maintenance and day-to-day operations requiring regular support. Yet, the more labor-intensive an energy-generating operation is, the more expensive the kilowatt of energy becomes. Offshore wind is currently the most expensive form of mainstream power generation available – more than 3x the cost of a combined cycle natural gas plant on a $/MWh basis – when all factors are considered (see chart below). The so called “levelized cost of electricity” or LCOE for offshore wind is climate and labor-market dependent, but the Energy Information Agency sees the regional weighted average LCOE of new offshore wind projects in 2040 dropping t0 65% of 2020 costs in ideal cases.

Read the full story at Forbes