October 29, 2024 — The newly proposed Central Atlantic wind energy area “unnecessarily includes some of the most critically important scallop fishing areas on the East Coast” – even as the Bureau of Offshore Energy Management has ample data to avoid the conflict, New Bedford port officials wrote in a scathing Oct. 21 comment letter to the agency.
BOEM has “all the technical and scientific detail necessary to understand how essential the Elephant Trunk, Hudson Canyon, and Delmarva areas are to the scallop industry,” wrote Gordon Carr, executive director of the New Bedford Port Authority. “What is stunning to us is that all that data is and was available to BOEM prior to setting the boundaries of the proposed call area.”
New Bedford is the most profitable U.S. fishing port – mostly on the strength of the sea scallop fishery – and the nation’s first big “offshore wind industrial marshalling port,” Carr noted.
Port advocates have been “diligent in providing comments for multiple offshore wind projects underway and proposed for the future,” Carr added. “However, we have become more and more concerned that development must only be accomplished in a responsible manner by protecting established industries that share our waters.”
That must “include learning from mistakes made in failing to avoid and address the interaction and conflicts between offshore wind and commercial fishing” already, and avoiding more conflicts early in BOEMs’s planning, the letter says.