Saving Seafood

Lawsuits buffet US offshore wind projects, seeking to end or delay them

September 19, 2024 — Opponents of offshore wind around the U.S. are pelting projects with lawsuits seeking to cancel them or tie them up for years in costly litigation.

The court cases represent another hurdle the nascent industry must overcome, particularly along the East Coast where opposition to offshore wind farms is vocal and well-organized.

They add another pressure point for an industry already struggling with escalating prices, shaky supply chains, and a handful of highly publicized turbine failures that opponents are seizing on as proof that the structures are unreliable and unsafe, something the industry denies.

There are 13 cases pending in federal courts targeting offshore wind projects, according to the American Clean Power Association, an offshore wind trade group. An undetermined number of additional lawsuits are active in state courts, they said.

Read the full article at the Associated Press 

Wind power group foresees delay of Biden administration 30 GW goal

July 10, 2024 — Offshore wind market analysts forecast 14 gigawatts of capacity in U.S. waters by 2030 – halfway to the Biden administration’s goal 30 GW, but with $65 billion of investments on track to achieve it in 2033.

The American Clean Power Association (ACP) on July 9 released its 2024 Offshore Wind Market Report, predicting the renewable power industry iwill support 56,000 jobs in the United States. The report counts 12 GW of capacity to come from projects with active offtake agreements. Those include 4 GW now under construction: Vineyard Wind and Revolution Wind off southern New England, and the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project.

“Across 37 leases in the U.S., there are now 56 GW (56,363 MW) of capacity under development, enough electricity to power the equivalent of 22 million homes,” the report states. “Market analysts forecast that there will be 14 GW of offshore wind deployed by 2030, 30 GW by 2033, and 40 GW online by 2035. These outlooks build on the 7.6 GW of offshore wind projects seeking to be operational by the end of 2027.”

Read the full article at WorkBoat

BOEM looks at fishermen compensation — but not everyone wants it

February 24, 2022 — Recent detailed proposals from the Fisheries Survival Fund and Responsible Offshore Development Alliance – coalitions of the commercial fishing industry – and the American Clean Power Association representing the offshore wind industry, presented the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management priority lists for their industries’ coexistence.

Some of those recommendations distinguish between ‘mitigation’ – avoiding conflicts between wind development and fishing – and ‘compensation’ – paying to make up for fishermen being displaced from longtime fishing grounds.

Fishing advocates say BOEM should be following a “mitigation hierarchy” under the National Environmental Policy Act to “avoid, minimize, mitigate and compensate” for impacts of offshore wind development.

BOEM officials and wind energy advocates say that’s being done. As examples they point to modifications to the South Fork Wind project east of Montauk, N.Y., to preserve critical bottom habitat, and shifts in the New York Bight wind energy lease areas to reduce conflicts with the scallop fleet.

Read the full story at WorkBoat

New Bedford says wind boundary changes just a start

January 18, 2022 — The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management made minor boundary adjustments in its New York Bight wind lease areas to reduce conflicts with the scallop fleet. That’s just a small start toward reducing the impact of wind development on the nation’s seafood industry, New Bedford port officials say.

The 480,000-acre wind lease offering – the first of the Biden administration and biggest to date – has brought on a wave of proposals, from both the fishing and wind power industries, for how they could co-exist.

Six lease areas outlined by BOEM in a final offering notice Jan. 12 include a westward shift of 2.5 miles to the Hudson South wind energy area, and a reduction of the so-called Central Bight area. The modest adjustment responds to requests last year from the scallop industry and the East Coast’s highest-earning fishing port – now also a base for offshore wind developers.

It could be a baby step toward better avoidance of conflicts between the Biden administration’s aggressive push to open more ocean spaces to wind energy development, and urgent warnings from the fishing industry and some ocean environmental advocates that regulators need to build more foresight and safeguards into the permitting process.

Those tweaks in the New York Bight auction plan came as a surprise, said New Bedford Mayor Jon Mitchell.

“We didn’t know that had happened until we actually dug into it,” said Mitchell, who wrote to BOEM during 2021 in support of the Fisheries Survival Fund recommendation to move the southwest boundary of Hudson South by five miles, aimed at giving a buffer zone between turbine arrays and scallop grounds.

The Fisheries Survival Fund and Responsible Offshore Development Alliance – both well-established coalitions of fishing interests – presented highly detailed recommendations to BOEM for dealing with those issues. The American Clean Power Association, an influential group in the renewable energy sector, likewise came out with its own proposals.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Biden administration looks to California, Oregon offshore wind power

November 18, 2021 — Interior Secretary Deb Haaland announced plans for up to seven new offshore wind lease sales, from Maine to the Gulf of Mexico and in the Pacific off California and Oregon, at the American Clean Power Association’s offshore wind conference Oct. 12 in Boston, Mass.

“This timetable provides two crucial ingredients for success: increased certainty and transparency,” Haaland said in an address to the industry advocacy group.

With the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management accelerating its timetable to review wind developers’ plans and prepare future lease offerings, agency officials are insisting they learned from mistakes dealing with the Northeast commercial fishing industry, and will work with them and other stakeholders “to minimize conflict with existing uses and marine life.”

“We are working to facilitate a pipeline of projects that will establish confidence for the offshore wind industry,” BOEM Director Amanda Lefton said. “At the same time, we want to reduce potential conflicts as much as we can while meeting the Administration’s goal to deploy 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030. This means we will engage early and often with all stakeholders prior to identifying any new Wind Energy Areas.”

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Wind farms blew jobs to the heartland. Will offshore wind do the same in Massachusetts?

October 21, 2021 — Before he worked for American Clean Power, Jeff Danielson was an Iowa state senator for 15 years, representing Black Hawk County, the state’s fourth most populous region, and a Democratic stronghold. But most of Iowa is rural and Republican. In 2020 residents voted wholesale for former President Donald Trump, an outspoken opponent of clean energy.

So it was a surprise, Danielson said, that in a 2017 vote on a redesign of the state license plate, the public chose to include an increasingly familiar feature on Iowa’s rural landscape.

“The license plate that won was a landscaped picture with silos, smokestacks — traditional manufacturing strength and farming — right alongside a wind turbine,” Danielson said. “If you drive around Iowa today, that is the license plate you see.”

What was once controversial has now become an accepted feature in the heartland. In 2019, wind energy generated more electricity than coal-fired plants for the first time in Iowa state history and now accounts for 57% of the state’s electric power generation, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).

It is the highest percentage of electrical production by wind power of any state and it happened fast. Five years ago coal-fired plants generated 53% of the state’s electricity, according to EIA, but as of 2020 only accounted for 24%.

It’s a matter of economics, wind power advocates say, not politics.

The U.S. is second only to China in terms of installed wind power. China has 288 gigawatts compared to the U.S., which has 122. But China is way ahead of the U.S. when it comes to offshore wind installations. This year, China displaced the U.K. as the top offshore wind country with 11.1 gigawatts of power installed. The U.S. has only one, a 55-megawatt, five-turbine offshore wind installation off Block Island, Rhode Island. 

Last year, the Biden administration set a goal of generating 30 gigawatts of offshore power along the East Coast by 2030 as part of its strategy to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the energy sector. Massachusetts’ recent update of its climate change plan set a goal of 5.6 gigawatts of offshore wind as an integral part of its plan to achieve a 50% emissions reduction target by 2030, and net-zero emissions from the energy sector by 2050.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times

 

MASSACHUSETTS: Gov. Baker breathes new life into offshore wind energy incentives

October 14, 2021 — In his keynote address to the American Clean Power Association’s Offshore Wind Conference, Gov. Charlie Baker announced significant changes to the state’s next round of energy contract bids.

“We’re ensuring that Massachusetts retains its leading edge position in the offshore wind policy debate in the US by proposing to, among other things, remove the price cap on project proposals to ensure that projects have the flexibility to incorporate storage, improve reliability, and offer greater economic development is part of their bids,” Baker told the hundreds of offshore wind energy advocates and industry people gathered in the Omni Seaport Hotel ballroom Wednesday afternoon.

Baker’s message was a response to criticism that his administration had, in the first three rounds of solicitations for state energy contracts, given disproportionate weight to bids offering a low price for electrical generation. Critics said the bids should have incorporated more incentive for wind farm developers to invest in local businesses and encourage manufacturing to be located in the state.

Massachusetts has historically had some of the highest electric rates in the country, and that resulted in the Baker administration’s emphasis on price. But technological leaps in wind turbine efficiency resulted in bid prices that were much lower than anticipated and many in the state Legislature — mayors like Jon Mitchell of New Bedford — and port city businesses complained to Baker that the state needed to factor in infrastructure.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times

 

The Vineyard Wind approval could usher in the first wave of offshore projects

May 14, 2021 — The Biden administration greenlit the first large-scale offshore wind project this month in a move that could help jumpstart an industry that thus far has been stagnant in the United States.

It’s a small first step toward meeting a goal President Joe Biden set in March for the U.S. to deploy 30 gigawatts of offshore wind power by 2030, but the country has a long way to go. Currently, the U.S. only has two small-scale pilot offshore wind projects in operation, one off the coast of Rhode Island and the other off the coast of Virginia, totaling about 42 megawatts of power.

Nonetheless, renewable energy advocates and energy analysts say the approval of the first large-scale project is a significant milestone for the offshore wind industry.

“It will facilitate the first wave of significant projects,” said Laura Morton, the senior director of offshore policy and regulatory affairs for the American Clean Power Association.

Read the full story at The Washington Examiner

Biden banks on offshore wind to help curb climate change

April 13, 2021 — Two wind turbines, each as tall as the Washington Monument, stand sentinel 27 miles off the coast of Virginia, the nation’s first offshore wind installation in federal waters.

The pilot project began producing power last October but is just the beginning for an industry poised for massive growth over the next decade. Longtime conflicts with the fishing industry remain, as well as some landowners, but with the help of a major push from the Biden administration, offshore wind may finally advance in the Atlantic.

Dominion Energy, Virginia’s state utility, plans to install nearly 200 more ocean turbines east of Cape Henry over the next five years. And developers have permits pending for 10 more offshore wind projects along the East Coast, from North Carolina to Maine.

The Biden administration wants to buoy the industry. Last month, the administration announced a $3 billion plan to expand offshore wind.

The ambitious goal is to generate 30 gigawatts of offshore wind power by the end of the decade, enough to power more than 10 million homes and cut 78 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions. That’s roughly the carbon equivalent of taking 17 million cars off the road for a year.

Offshore wind represents an opportunity for the Biden administration to address two major goals: reducing carbon emissions and creating jobs.

“Nowhere is the scale of that opportunity clearer than for offshore wind,” National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy said in announcing the new plan.

The projects could support tens of thousands of jobs, from maintenance at sea to steel production far inland.

There is just one other offshore wind project currently online in the United States: five turbines in state waters off the coast of Block Island, R.I.

The industry has more proposals in the works, including:

“This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity,” said Laura Morton of the American Clean Power Association, an industry group. “We can provide clean energy, slash carbon emissions and create jobs.”

Read the full story at The Maine Beacon

On U.S. East Coast, Has Offshore Wind’s Moment Finally Arrived?

February 24, 2021 — About 60 miles east of New York’s Montauk Point, a 128,000-acre expanse of the Atlantic Ocean is expected to produce enough electricity to power around 850,000 homes when it’s populated with wind turbines and connected to the onshore grid in the next few years.

Fifteen miles off Atlantic City, New Jersey, another windy swath of ocean is due to start generating enough power for some 500,000 homes when a forest of 850-foot-high turbines start turning there in 2024.

And off the Virginia coast some 200 miles to the south, a utility-led offshore wind project is scheduled to produce carbon-free power equivalent to taking 1 million cars off the road when it is complete in 2026.

The fledgling U.S. offshore wind industry is finally poised to become a commercial reality off the northeast and mid-Atlantic coasts within the next five years, thanks to robust commitments to buy its power from seven coastal states, new support from the Biden administration, and billions of dollars in investment by an industry that sees a huge market for electric power in Eastern states.

New York, New Jersey, Virginia, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Maryland have together committed, through legislation or executive action, to buying about 30,000 megawatts (MW) of offshore electricity by 2035 — enough to power roughly 20 million homes, according to the American Clean Power Association (ACPA), which advocates for renewable energy. Projects totaling 11,000 MW have been awarded so far.

Read the full story at Yale Environment 360