June 12, 2019 — The head of the Ørsted U.S. Offshore wind energy company recently asked Wainscott residents to support his company’s plans to build the South Fork Wind Farm in the ocean off Block Island, even if they vehemently opposed a proposal to bring the power ashore in the tiny hamlet. Many said they planned to do just that.
The debate to be held on Tuesday, June 11, before officials from the New York State Public Service Commission will be heated, no doubt, but still will rage within an arena of inevitability.
At issue will be the landing of the power cable from the wind farm, in either Wainscott or Hither Hills—but based on the presumption that the 15 wind turbines will be constructed and that the cable must land somewhere.
Discussions of the wind farm among its most dead-set opponents, commercial fishermen, has turned decidedly in recent months, from stopping the project entirely to, instead, identifying ways to limit the negative impacts it wind farm could have—and that was even before the official public input phase of the construction and operations plan had begun.
Fishermen from Rhode Island recently inked a compensation agreement with Vineyard Wind, another wind farm development company seeking to build dozens of turbines in the ocean just beyond where the South Fork Wind Farm would rise. Those fishermen lamented that they signed the deal—which makes about $16 million available to them over 30 years, as compensation for losses in income from fishing that they might experience because of the wind farm—only because they felt hogtied, with the wind farm approaching like a couch tumbling downstairs as their negotiating leverage weakened.