February 12, 2024 — Six offshore wind lease areas in the New York Bight are more than 30 miles offshore of the region’s bustling suburbs and seaside resorts – distance that might have defused resistance to the wind energy projects before.
Now opposition groups that grew in reaction to nearshore projects, like Ørsted’s cancelled Ocean Wind plan off New Jersey, show few signs they will accept a new round of proposals farther east to the horizon.
Over 100 visitors walked through a Bureau of Ocean Energy Management public scoping session Feb. 8 in a Toms River, N.J., hotel meeting room, talking to BOEM workers and giving the agency testimony in video interviews and writing. The agency has grown to prefer the low-key scoping process – in-person and online – to fulfill its legal obligations to gather public input short of full-blown public hearings.
The visitors were not shy with opinions.
“What we’re really worried about is the cabling. It’s death,” said Ed Baxter, a commercial fisherman with the Fishermen’s Dock Cooperative in Point Pleasant Beach, N.J.
The offshore leases now being planned for wind power development would need turbine towers linked by a network of power cables, and linked by energy export cables coming ashore near New York City and Sea Girt, N.J. A future cable network would potentially shut mobile gear fisheries like scallop dredging out of those routes, if fishermen can’t be safe that their gear won’t snag on cables, said Baxter.