July 26, 2021 — For the past nine years, Tom Dameron has managed government relations for Surfside Foods, a New Jersey-based shellfish company. If you asked him five years ago what his biggest challenge was at work, the lifelong fisherman would have said negotiating annual harvest quotas for surf and quahog clams.
Today, he’d tell you it is surviving the arrival of the offshore wind industry, which is slated to install hundreds of turbines atop prime fishing grounds over the next decade.
While there isn’t a single wind turbine spinning off the coast of the Garden state yet, plans are under way for new offshore wind developments that hope to power more than a million homes with carbon-free energy over the next several years.
The wind farms are expected to create thousands of new jobs, but the price tag looks steep to Dameron, who fears those jobs and climate benefits will come at the expense of his industry. If wind lease areas are fully developed across the mid-Atlantic, Dameron said clam fishermen will lose access to highly productive areas of the ocean, which could send the multimillion-dollar industry into a “downward spiral”.
“I could see the clam industry in Atlantic City disappearing,” Dameron said.
Dameron’s fears are being echoed by fishermen across the country as they face the arrival of a big new energy business in waters many have fished for generations.
Offshore wind, which has long struggled to take off in the US due to high costs, regulatory uncertainty and fierce resistance from shoreside residents, is now surging forward under the Biden administration. In March, Joe Biden committed to building 30 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2030, enough to power 10m homes and avoid 78m metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions.