Focus: Make Way

Make Way

Poised to surge, the U.S. offshore wind industry faces risks.

By Kirk Moore, Contributing Editor

With enthusiastic support from the Biden administration and state governments, the sails are full and speed is gathering for the U.S. offshore wind energy industry. But shoals lie ahead.

Federal regulators, wind developers and state of cials must come to grips with details of how building hundreds of wind turbines off the East Coast can be reconciled with maritime and coastal communities that are demanding to be heard.

Opponents in coastal communities are looking for ways to block onshore wind power infrastructure, especially power cable landfalls and grid interconnections.

The realm envisioned for offshore power, from Maine to the Carolinas, is a migratory highway for critically endangered species like the northern right whale. Less than 400 whales are estimated to survive now in the entire population.

East Coast wind energy will bring construction and undersea noise that “will probably go on for decades,” said Tricia Conte of Save Our Shoreline in Ocean City, N.J., which is opposed to Ørsted’s planned Ocean Wind project. “I don’t see how those under-400 animals are going to survive this.”

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy signed legislation July 22 to strip Ocean City, or any other local government, from the ability to stop offshore wind power cables from being installed. Murphy and powerful Democratic leaders in the state Legislature who advocate developing offshore wind say they won’t allow local governments to derail the state’s renewable energy goals.

A week earlier, Save Our Shoreline brought in Michael Shellenberger to speak in Ocean City, where the longtime environmental writer and founder of the nonpro t think tank Environmental Progress made his case that “if you really care about climate change, we’d be doing more nuclear power.”

Shellenberger is a prominent gure in what has been called the ecomodernist movement – intellectuals who recognize threats to the environment but believe society will overcome them with technology. Author of the book “Apocalypse Never” published by Harper Collins in 2020, Shellenberger summarized his views from the viewpoint of an “environmental humanist” recognizing global progress since the 1970s.

After a morning spent with his hosts on a whale-watching vessel, Shellenberger laid into the subject in his talk. Beyond direct impacts from wind farm construction and operation, any losses to the right whale population would have consequences for the commercial shing industry, already under intense pressure to end gear entanglements with whales, he said.

“You can’t just go and add another signi cant impact to the species,” he said.

Ørsted has made changes to its planned Ocean Wind layout in response to shermen’s concerns, and the developers must address other environmental issues, so “it is not a done deal at all,” Shellenberger told the audience. “There’s much more you guys can do. There’s no reason this project can’t be wiped right off the drawing board.”

COMPENSATORY MITIGATION

Reuters reported on July 27 that of cials in the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management who are driving offshore wind planning are talking about compensatory payments for displaced shermen.

But that was news to Annie Hawkins, executive director of the Responsible Offshore Development Alliance, a coalition of shing groups and coastal communities. The only direct knowledge her group’s executive committee got was in an informal conference call with BOEM administrator Amanda Lefton and her staff, said Hawkins.

Lefton said that BOEM would be working with state government of cials to explore “compensatory mitigation” for shermen forced out of work by wind farm development and would begin scheduling meetings for that effort. It also came up during a BOEM presentation to the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council in June, said Hawkins.

But Hawkins says that process is backward in not including shermen at the onset of discussions. The funding method needs to be publicly discussed too, she said.

“It’s an impact fee, it’s not mitigation,” said Hawkins. The funding should be calculated early and could be incorporated into wind developers’ power purchase agreements with states, not done at the 11th hour, she said.

It must be a regional approach, not project-by-project, and compensation should come after regulators and developers have done everything possible to

Michael Shellenberger is an environmental journalist and author.

Environmental Progress

minimize negative impacts, Hawkins added. “We want that at the end, after we’ve done everything possible to eliminate the need,” she said.

Meanwhile BOEM continues to forge ahead on its goal of getting more environmental reviews for East Coast projects underway this year. The latest is for the Construction and Operations Plan (COP) submitted by Kitty Hawk Wind LLC for a project off North Carolina with up to 69 total wind turbine generators, one offshore substation, inter-array cables, and up to two transmission cables to come ashore in Virginia Beach.

North Carolina’s goals for 2.8 gigawatts of offshore wind energy by 2030, and up to 8 GW by 2040, would build toward making the waters off the Virginia and Carolina capes another center of the industry. Virginia has its own target of 100% renewable sources by 2045, with 5.2 GW of offshore wind energy by 2034.

SHOREBIRD IMPACT STUDY

Red knot shorebirds make epic annual migrations, some logging up to 18,000 miles from the southern tip of South America to Canada and back, dropping down onto Delaware Bay beaches in May to gorge on horseshoe crab eggs.

That ancient pattern was disrupted by overharvesting of horseshoe crabs for commercial fishing bait in the 1990s. Biologists say neither the crab nor red knot populations have fully recovered.

Now, the prospect of dozens, perhaps hundreds of wind turbines spinning over waters on the East Coast outer continental shelf raises questions of how those structures may affect the red knot, considered a threatened species by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Developers Atlantic Shores Offshore Wind LLC engaged one of the world’s top experts to find out.

“The birds jump off from Cape Cod, Brigantine, Stone Harbor,” said Larry Niles, ticking off coastal Massachusetts and New Jersey feeding grounds for the red knots. “We know the birds are going through the wind (power) areas.”

The Rampion offshore wind farm off the Sussex coast in the UK.

As the former chief of New Jersey’s Endangered and Non-Game Species Program, Niles started the Delaware Bay Shorebird Project, now in its 25th year of monitoring the migration. He’s currently principal of Wildlife Restoration Partners, with years of experience assessing the health of red knots with other shorebirds and working on wind power studies.

Plans for 850-foot-tall turbines might seem to present deadly barriers to the birds. But after years of tagging birds with ultra-lightweight tracking devices, researchers think the red knots over the ocean typically climb to cruising altitudes around 5,000 feet, said Niles.

“We model what the birds do while they’re migrating,” based on laborious downloading and interpretation of data from tracking transmitters, said Niles. Like human airline pilots, in flight the birds are “assessing the strength and direction of the wind,” seeking the best airflow to speed their journey, said Niles.

The bird counts climbed back to around 30,000 in recent years, before dropping to 17,000 and then a new low point this spring of 6,880.

The 2020 migration season was affected by two early tropical storms on the East Coast in May that year, and persistent northerly winds this spring may have been a factor against the shorebirds, said Niles.

“This year the (horseshoe crab) spawn was on time, and I think it was good,” said Niles. “So, I think we’re looking at a real decline” in the total numbers of the red knot population, he said. That makes the Atlantic Shores project even more timely. “It puts even greater value to the study,” said Niles. New satellite tags attached to red knots “will also give us really important conservation information,” with precise location data that will help U.S. and Canadian wildlife agencies map out habitat areas that should be saved for the birds, he said. Paul Phifer, the permitting manager at Atlantic Shores, is familiar with shorebird conservation efforts from his time with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the Northeast. In his position now with wind developers, Phifer talked to his old colleagues in the wildlife profession and realized the possibilities for a first study of wind power and shorebird migration. “The limited data we got last year shows they go really high” while migrating between South America, the U.S. East Coast and Canada, said Phifer. “We’re talking about a substantial long-term project.” Atlantic Shores is paying for all of the study’s costs – an estimated $350,000. The shorebird study has not been a requirement of permitting from BOEM.