Seafreeze Shoreside, Inc., Petitioner, Amicus briefs submitted by Green Oceans, Protect Our Coast NJ, America First Policy Institute, and the Save Right Whales Coalition
Given that the SCOTUS declined to hear a Vineyard Wind challenge by the Nantucket-based ACK for Whales group, the odds of the new challenges being heard would seem to be low. However, it’s noteworthy that both Vineyard Wind and the Federal Government have waived their right to respond to these petitions. The Government’s waiver to respond to the RODA petition is pasted below.
Despite the spectacular 2022 lease sales, not all is rosy for US offshore wind development.
In 2011, then-Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said the Obama administration had set a goal of “10 gigawatts of offshore wind generating capacity by 2020 and 54 gigawatts by 2030.” How has that worked? Well, 11 years after Salazar’s speech, the US has seven turbines operating offshore with a total of capacity of 42 megawatts — or some 9,958 megawatts short of the goal laid out by Salazar.
Gordon Hughes, a professor of economics at the University of Edinburgh, has found that the output of Europe’s offshore wind turbines has been declining by about 4.5% per year. In a report titled “Wind Power Economics: Rhetoric and Reality,” published by the London-based Renewable Energy Foundation in 2020, Hughes concluded that declining output will result in higher operating costs that will start to exceed revenues “after 12 or 15 years.
…addressing climate change through ocean “industrialization” using an “inefficient, expensive and largely untested strategy” was not the right path forward – Kari Martin, Clean Ocean Action
“By undertaking an industrialization project this big, it far outweighs any (climate change) benefit anybody’s ever talked about, or even tried to quantify,” he said. “The harms of this undertaking is, in my view, far worse than any benefits we could realize.” – Michael Dean, Middletown, NJ
In their latest publication, (scientists at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon) now show that large-scale wind farms can strongly influence marine primary production as well as the oxygen levels in and beyond the wind farm areas. Their results were published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.
… For example, Nils Christiansen’s team proved that wake turbulences—air vortices caused by wind turbines—change the flow and stratification of the water beneath them. But the climate just above the sea surface is also being permanently changed, as another team led by Dr. Naveed Akhtar was able to show.
On October 19, 2021, RODA issued the government agencies a 60-day Notice of its Intent to Sue if they did not comply with the Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, and other federal environmental statutes. “The Alliance received no reply, and the environmental violations were not remedied,” Hawkins stated. “The decisions on this project didn’t balance ocean resource conservation and management, and must not set a precedent for the enormous “pipeline of projects” the government plans to facilitate in the near term. So we had no alternative to filing suit.”
Vineyard Wind 1 is a 62-turbine offshore wind project to be built 15 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard, and is the first commercial-scale wind project approved for US offshore waters.
Of particular interest to the offshore industry, RODA’s court filing raises concerns about the structural integrity of the 13 MW Haliade-X turbines during Atlantic hurricanes, ice shedding in the winter, radar interference, pile driving noise, Jones Act violations, and failure to consider decommissioning issues.
South Fork Wind: 19 miles southeast of Block Island, Rhode Island
12 or fewer Siemens-Gamesa’s 11-megawatt turbines
BOEM approved the larger (62 turbine) Vineyard Wind 1 project on July 15, 2021. Those turbines will be located approximately 15 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. On Oct. 19, the Responsible Offshore Development Alliance (RODA) filed a 60-day Notice of Intent to Sue the Federal Government over violations of lease management and environmental statutes.
Washington, D.C. (9/13/2021) —Responsible Offshore Development Alliance (RODA), a broad membership-based coalition of fishing industry associations and fishing companies, filed a Petition for Review today in the First Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals regarding the Secretary of the Interior’s July 15, 2021 decision approving the Vineyard Wind 1 offshore wind energy project. This action is the culmination of many years of conscientious participation by fisheries professionals only to see their expertise and value summarily ignored by decision-makers during the leasing process.
The RODA statement is quite strong. While the new administration understandably wants to advance offshore wind development, they would have been wise to accept input from RODA and other interested parties before approving Vineyard Wind I. The fishing industry certainly has a legitimate interest in the outcome of this and other offshore wind projects.
Bud's Offshore Energy (BOE) 