August 12, 2019 — The following are excerpts from stories originally published by Bloomberg and State House News Service on the most recent developments on the Vineyard Wind project. For more coverage on Vineyard Wind, visit Saving Seafood.
The Trump administration cast the fate of the nation’s first major offshore wind farm into doubt by extending an environmental review for the $2.8 billion Vineyard Wind project off Massachusetts.
The Interior Department has ordered an additional study of the farm, proposed by Avangrid Inc. and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, Interior Secretary David Bernhardt said in an interview with Bloomberg News Friday. The project, which has drawn opposition from fishermen and coastal communities, had been scheduled to be operational by early 2022. The developers have warned that regulatory delays could put it in jeopardy.
Bernhardt said it’s crucial the impacts be thoroughly studied. “For offshore wind to thrive on the outer continental shelf, the federal government has to dot their I’s and cross their T’s,” he said.
An Interior Department review explored how Vineyard Wind may affect other industries and resources, including marine life. But the National Marine Fisheries Service raised concerns it looked too narrowly at potential cumulative effects on fishing, prompting the supplemental review, Bernhardt said.
“If it’s going to be developed, it needs to be developed in a way that everyone gets to say, at least, that we didn’t shave the ball,” Bernhardt said.
Read the full story at Bloomberg
Federal Review Will Further Delay Vineyard Wind
Vineyard Wind, the $2.8 billion, 800-megawatt offshore wind project planned for the waters off Martha’s Vineyard, has been delayed and will not move forward on the timeline it has been anticipating due to a federal agency’s decision to undertake a broad study of the potential impacts of offshore wind projects planned up and down the coast.
The decision of the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to launch a “cumulative impacts analysis” and hold up the approval of a key permit for Vineyard Wind until that analysis is complete will likely upend the supply chain, financing and construction timeline for the project chosen by the Baker administration and state utility companies to fulfill part of a 2016 clean energy law.
The project has been on unsteady ground in recent weeks after the Department of the Interior and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management notified project officials that the government was “not yet prepared” to issue a final environmental impact statement, which had been expected in July.
On Friday, BOEM said it had received comments from stakeholders and other federal agencies requesting “a more robust cumulative analysis” and decided to launch a more comprehensive look at offshore wind projects after federal officials “determined that a greater build out of offshore wind capacity is reasonably foreseeable than was analyzed in the initial draft EIS” for Vineyard Wind.