November 20, 2019 — The fierce competitors in the local offshore wind industry probably hoped to make a big splash with this news: They teamed up to propose a grid that creates uniform spacing between each tower and a similar orientation for the various wind farm proposals south of Martha’s Vineyard.
One of the chief goals was to assuage concerns among fishermen who worry that an uncoordinated array of hundreds of towers would make the waters hard to navigate — effectively displacing them from rich fishing grounds.
However, plenty of fishermen aren’t taking the bait. For many of them, the one nautical mile distance proposed between each giant turbine tower simply isn’t enough — especially for boats that are dragging big nets behind them.
Persuading fishermen to toe the line could be crucial to the nascent industry’s survival. Construction was about to begin on what would have been the first major offshore wind farm in the US until Interior Secretary David Bernhardt dragged out the permitting in August. Bernhardt ostensibly wants a study of the cumulative impact from all the wind farms in the pipeline, before allowing the first one to proceed.