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Offshore wind cumulative impact issue analysis

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From CFACT

By David Wojick

When the Feds finally do the cumulative environmental impact analysis for whales as mandated by the Endangered Species Act there are a number of basic issues to be resolved. Here is a quick look at some for the desperately endangered North Atlantic Right Whale (NARW).

Cumulative refers to the combined impact of multiple offshore projects. The first issue is which projects to combine for analysis. NARW are found along the entire Atlantic coastal waters which bounds the geography. Other endangered critters are found along the Gulf and West Coasts.

Projects can be in very different stages of development. Here is a hierarchy of sorts that gives several obvious options, from relatively small to enormous.

1. Projects built or approved for construction. There are about 10 of these. They are the immediate threat, but the overall threat to the NARW is, of course, much greater than this. Given that they have been approved for construction, it might be difficult to make big changes to protect the NARW, although not impossible.

2. The above, plus the projects actively seeking near-term approval. This is more like 30 projects, and the combined threat is very real. Cumulative impact analysis might seriously constrain this long list.

3. Next come the many projects listed in “AN ACTION PLAN FOR OFFSHORE WIND TRANSMISSION DEVELOPMENT IN THE U.S. ATLANTIC REGION“. This Action Plan is from the Energy Department and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), which is actually building the combined offshore wind monster.

The Action Plan shows specific projects in ever-increasing numbers by five-year increments, from 30,000 MW in 2030 to 85,000 MW in 2050. These projects are somewhat speculative, but since this is a BOEM Plan, its cumulative impact on the NARW should certainly be assessed for each five-year increment. It is likely that such a massive plan would be constrained by the results of this assessment.

For each cumulative impact assessment, the next question is, what potential impacts on the NARW to look at? Here are some obvious examples that I have discussed in prior articles.

A. Acoustic noise harassment from sources such as sonar surveys, site construction, as well as operation. Given that some approved individual projects have construction harassment estimates alone over 200 NARW each, the combined total harassment for all projects and sources could be enormous.

B. Moreover, it is likely that combined noises will create new levels of harassment. The potential for NARW extinction is obvious, given that their entire population is less than 350, with just 70 or so breeding females.

C. Adverse wake effects, such as reduced-energy air plumes and suspended sediment plumes that reduce food supplies. Here, clusters of nearby projects will be especially important. The Action Plan consists of numerous large clusters of projects.

D. Forced changes in navigation routes and fishing grounds which can lead to concentrated threats of deadly ship strikes and entanglement drownings. It is easy to forget that whales cannot breathe underwater.

It should be noted that adverse impacts can combine over time as well as space. The migratory NARW will be forced to run a gauntlet of successive projects stretching at least from Georgia to Maine.

Here is BOEM’s own discussion of the combined impacts over time for pile driving during construction of projects. I could not have said it better.

“It is possible that pile driving could displace animals into areas with lower habitat quality or higher risk of vessel collision or fisheries interaction. Multiple construction activities within the same calendar year could potentially affect migration, foraging, calving, and individual fitness. The magnitude of impacts would depend upon the locations, duration, and timing of concurrent construction. Such impacts could be long term, of high intensity, and of high exposure level. Generally, the more frequently an individual’s normal behaviors are disrupted or the longer the duration of the disruption, the greater the potential for biologically significant consequences to individual fitness. The potential for biologically significant effects is expected to increase with the number of pile-driving events to which an individual is exposed.”

Empire Wind, Draft Environmental Impact Statement v.1, Page 3.15-14, PDF page 372

No doubt there are other important issues to consider in a proper cumulative impact analysis.

Collectively, offshore wind is a massive proposed multi-project program with equally massive combined environmental impacts. These cumulative impacts must be assessed under the Endangered Species Act for the desperately endangered North Atlantic Right Whale and all the other listed critters that would be affected.

Constraint in project impact should be the order of the day.

Offshore wind is gearing up to bulldoze the ocean

From CFACT

By David Wojick

The Biden Administration has recently produced a wave of plans and regulatory actions aimed at building a monstrous amount of destructive offshore wind. No environmental impact assessment is included.

Time scales range from tomorrow to 2050. Here is a quick look at some of it, starting with the Grand Plan.

“Pathways to Commercial Liftoff: Offshore Wind” is the grandiose title of the Energy Department’s version of Biden’s vision. Their basic idea is that having successfully traversed the unexpected cost crisis, offshore wind is ready to take off.

They point out that even though costs quickly jumped an average of 65%, the boom market is unchanged. The coastal States are raring to go with huge offshore wind targets and laws. In short, it is a seller’s market. Cost is no object.

They note that State mandates and targets already exceed the Biden goal of 100,000 MW by 2050. But why stop there? They say that Net Zero requires an incredible 250,000 MW of offshore wind. At 15 MW a turbine, this is just under 17,000 monster towers.

The word “environmental” occurs frequently in this 62-page grand vision but it is always about environmental justice.  The cumulatively destructive environmental impacts of lining our coast with towers and cables are ignored apparently not worth mentioning. Neither is cost.

Next comes transmission, where we have “AN ACTION PLAN FOR OFFSHORE WIND TRANSMISSION DEVELOPMENT IN THE U.S. ATLANTIC REGION“. While the Pathways plan covers the US, this one is just about the Atlantic because that is where the big action is now.

This 110-pager is from the Energy Department and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which is actually building the offshore wind monster.

The basic idea is simple. Instead of bringing the juice ashore individually from each giant wind facility, we will build a massive high-voltage grid in the ocean. This way, we can move the energy up and down the coast from wherever it is generated to where it is needed.

In the Plan, there are actually three backbone grids: northern, central, and southern, but this detail need not concern us. There is, of course, a huge network of feeder lines connecting the backbones to the legion of individual giant generation facilities.

Given the incredibly huge generation numbers in the Liftoff Plan, this is a very big grid indeed. It is a DC grid, so I guess the juice gets turned into AC onshore, where it then ties to the suitably beefed-up land grid. Beefing that up is another huge unknown cost.

There are many issues with this grand design, including legal and policy ones, and many of these are mentioned. How this ocean-going grid ties into State utility law is an interesting example.

Environmental impacts are only addressed as a research topic, not as a potential problem, except for floating wind, where some big problems are mentioned in passing. The feel-good idea of minimizing impact occurs frequently, but what those impacts might be is not said.

As is typical for BOEM, they talk about monitoring a good bit. Their approach to environmental impact is let’s build it and see what happens as though extinction of the North Atlantic Right Whale was reversible. The concept of cumulative impacts is not addressed.

Cost allocation is a major economic topic, but there is nothing whatever on what this underwater monstrosity might cost.

Returning to today, several things have happened. First, BOEM has announced a lot of new lease sales over the next five years (the Biden II years?). These run from Maine to Oregon, fixed and floating, with five scheduled for this year alone.

Some are in new places, while others are in already crowded areas like the New York Bight. As always, there is no cumulative environmental impact analysis. It’s like BOEM never heard of that, even though the law clearly calls for it when piling on the projects.

More ominously, there are new regulations governing the permitting of offshore wind projects. The developers love these new rules, which tells us they are not designed for environmental protection. This is from the BOEM press release:

“”The final modernization rule will streamline the permitting process and reduce regulatory barriers for developers. It will also lead to greater collaboration between federal, state, and local stakeholders, ensuring that offshore wind projects are developed in a sustainable and responsible manner,” said Anne Reynolds, the American Clean Power Association Vice President for Offshore Wind.”

The primary “regulatory barrier” is environmental impact analysis. The new rules require agencies to rush these, which means glossing over them with no time for serious analysis.

Today’s actions may seem small, but given the long-term Plans, they are anything but. It is all part of a huge rush to do something enormously expensive and environmentally destructive for which there is no need whatsoever.

This offshore bulldozer must be stopped before it is too late.

It’s Been A Brutal Year For Offshore Wind — Despite Analysts’ Best Guesses

From The Daily Caller

NICK POPE

CONTRIBUTOR

Some analysts predicted that the U.S. offshore wind industry would bounce back after a rough 2023, but many of the same problems that plagued the industry last year have continued to burden developers through the beginning of 2024.

Energy data analytics provider Wood Mackenzie, consultants from Deloitte, Reuters and environmental lawyers for a law firm called Locke Lord variously projected that the U.S. offshore wind sector would rebound after a distressing 2023. However, four months in to 2024, the inflation, higher borrowing costs, logistical problems and supply chain woes that battered the industry in 2023 have not relented, forcing developers to cancel or seek to renegotiate deals as they did in 2023.

“Obviously, providing affordable and reliable energy for everyone is a challenging endeavor,” Kevin Dayaratna, a senior research fellow for the Heritage Foundation, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Even despite all of the subsidies these alternative forms of energy – such as offshore wind – have received, they have still failed to become a significantly mainstream source of energy.” (RELATED: Blue State Doubles Down On Offshore Wind After 2023’s Massive Failure)

Since the start of 2023, approximately 60% of all contracts signed by American offshore wind developers have been cancelled, according to E&E News. Ørsted, a Danish company and one of the world’s leading offshore wind developers, backed out of two major planned projects in New Jersey in 2023, while other players like General Electric, British Petroleum (BP) and Equinor attempted to renegotiate with state governments as economic headwinds eroded projects’ profitability.

Similar developments have played out to start 2024, with developers up and down the east coast backing out of deals to sell power from their projects as the same fundamental economic problems persist despite the projections of some market experts and media outlets.

“Vessel owners and operators are actively contracting with original equipment manufacturers and project developers to reserve vessels for project construction in 2024 and beyond,” Locke Lord attorneys M. Benjamin Cowan and Emily Huggins Jones wrote on January 3. “Thus, despite significant headwinds in 2023, with improving economics, more flexible procurement procedures, continued federal support, and increasing legislative support, the U.S. offshore market appears to have weathered the worst of the storm and is poised for growth in the coming year.”

On the same day that the two attorneys published their market analysis, Equinor and BP backed out of a contract with New York state to provide power generated by their planned Empire Wind 2 offshore wind farm due to inflationary pressures. Subsequently, three other New York offshore wind projects were cancelled on April 19.

“The offshore wind sector, which faced setbacks in 2023, is expected to rebound in 2024 with tangible opportunities and a record number of tenders,” Wood Mackenzie wrote on January 25. “In summary, 2024 holds the promise of a global wind energy resurgence, with key areas of focus including market recovery, reliability, profitability for [original equipment manufacturers] and the offshore wind sector’s evolving dynamics.”

The day after Wood Mackenzie published those words, Ørsted announced that it had backed out of Maryland’s orders approving its Skipjack 1 and 2 projects off the state’s coast. The company said at the time that inflation, high refinancing costs and supply chain issues combined to render the state’s subsidies economically unviable, but that it would not give up on the projects altogether. (RELATED: Environmental Laws That Impeded Pipelines For Years Could Trip Up Biden’s Sprint Toward Offshore Wind)

Several senior employees of Deloitte, one of the country’s top consulting firms, also projected confidence that the offshore wind industry would be able to turn things around in 2024.

“Offshore wind investments dropped in 2023 amid challenges with costs and permitting, but the tide is expected to turn in 2024 as construction and operations get underway at several key projects,” reads a February 9 piece by Deloitte consultants Marlene Motyka, Jim Thomson, Kate Hardin and Carolyn Amon published in The Wall Street Journal’s “sustainable business” section. “Transmission is a factor in many constraints on renewable deployments, although [Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act] and [Inflation Reduction Act] programs and grants could start tackling transmission issues in 2024.”

Reuters, a global news outlet, echoed some of this optimism in its own projection that the American offshore wind industry would rally after 2023’s turbulence.

“The U.S. offshore wind industry is eying a brighter 2024, with work expected to start on several projects following a year marked by stalled developments and billions of dollars in write-offs,” reads a Reuters piece published in December 2023 under the headline “U.S. offshore wind poised for success next year after turbulent 2023.”

The industry’s problems are also complicating President Joe Biden’s climate agenda. The Biden administration has set a goal of having offshore wind providing enough electricity to power 10 million American homes by 2030, but Reuters reported in November 2023 that the target is almost certainly out of reach due to the industry’s struggles.

The industry has struggled despite the availability of robust federal subsidies, including tax credits contained in the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s signature climate bill. Despite the industry’s missteps, the administration is pushing ahead with its offshore wind agenda, releasing a robust five-year leasing schedule for the industry on Wednesday that could see up to a dozen lease sales through 2028.

“Biden’s offshore wind fetish ignores the realities affecting the industry here and abroad, but that is the hallmark of all his energy and climate schemes,” Dan Kish, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Energy Research, told the DCNF. “Warren Buffett once said the only reason to build wind turbines is the tax credits, and he was talking about onshore wind. Offshore wind is three times as expensive, and it only makes sense with sweetheart electric rates for the builders gifted to them by politicians looking for golden parachute jobs with wind companies after consumers boot them out of office when they start getting their bills.”

Wood Mackenzie, Reuters, Deloitte, Locke Lord and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.

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Saving whales started as a left-wing cause, but now conservatives are taking up the fight

From CFACT

By Kevin Killough:

Saving the whales was once a leading cause of left-wing environmental groups like Greenpeace. But offshore wind development has created an ironic twist in which conservative groups are now the loudest voices raising concerns about the North Atlantic right whale’s extinction.

The Heartland Institute, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) and the National Legal and Policy Center, want to draw attention to what they say is a connection between an increase in dead whales along the East Coast and industrialization of the U.S. Coast. A new study by an independent acoustician concludes that they may be right.

Off the shores of the East Coast are plans for the development of massive amounts of offshore wind farms. Among them is Dominion Energy’s Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project, which is expected to be the largest offshore wind farm in the world.

Last month, a coalition of conservative groups filed a lawsuit against federal agencies, their top officials, and Dominion Energy, arguing the permits didn’t properly assess the danger the project presents to whales. The same groups Tuesday submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for Dominion’s species protection plan, which they said isn’t publicly available.

Greenpeace, whose first campaign in 1973 was aimed at stopping whaling, insists that concerns about the impacts to whales from extensive offshore wind developments spreading up the East and soon the West Coast are nothing more than “right-wing disinformation,” and media outlets like the Associated Press and The Guardian report these concerns as “unfounded” and “false.”

Both the Associated Press and the Guardian have received funding from anti-fossil fuel groups in support of their reporting on climate and the environment.

Dominion spokesperson Jeremy Slayton told public broadcaster WHRO that the coalition’s lawsuit has no merits. He said that the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) has done a thorough review of the potential impacts to marine wildlife and the environment from the company’s project.

“The overwhelming consensus of federal agencies and scientific organizations is that offshore wind does not adversely impact marine life,” Slayton told WHRO.

Dr. David Wojick, policy advisor for CFACT, told Just The News he couldn’t believe the company’s statement. “I use the word ‘absurd,’ but ‘preposterous’ is probably the right word,” Wojick said.

Dominion received from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration the authorization to “harass”– in limited terms — 80,000 animals over the next five years. Under federal law, offshore wind developers have to get permits, called incidental harassment authorization, to conduct activities that might threaten marine animals.

There are two types of harassment under federal law — Level A and Level B. Level A has the “potential to injure a marine mammal or marine mammal stock in the wild” and Level B has the same potential but could cause injury. Activities that cause these impacts are illegal, without the authorizations.

“If you chase a whale or a dolphin with your boat, they’ll take your boat,” Wojick said.

New research

Robert Rand, founder of the acoustics consultancy company Rand Acoustics, is trying to draw attention to what his research is showing — there is a lack of adequate protections for the whales that migrate along this corridor where all these projects are going up.

He told Just The News he gets little in the way of response from federal agencies that are overseeing the permitting for these projects.

Last year, after increases in the number of whale deaths threatened to drive the North Atlantic right whale into extinction, Rand produced an independent investigation of underwater noise levels from sonar survey vessels, which map the ocean floor for the planning of the projects.

Rand’s study found that the incidental harassment authorizations don’t impose sufficient mitigation requirements to protect marine animals. He sent the findings off to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM). He said he never received any response.

His latest study surveyed the noise from pile driving, which is when developers drive a giant steel monopile into the seabed by pounding on it. He took sound measurements as the 5000-pound, 700-foot long pile-driving vessel Orion was driving monopiles into seabed off the coasts of Nantucket Island for the Vineyard Wind project.

Rand’s conclusions suggest federal agencies are underestimating the impact to whales from offshore wind development. “This investigation discovered a substantial underestimation of both impulsive and continuous noise levels by current regulatory standards, suggesting that the actual exposure to harmful noise levels from pile driving for marine mammals like the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale is substantially greater than NMFS [National Marine Fisheries Service] acknowledges in its existing protective measures,” Rand wrote in his report.

Wojick, who wasn’t involved in Rand’s research, said that the implication here is that the 80,000 estimation of “harassed” marine animals that Dominion is permitted for is likely a way too low.

Vessel collision

A humpback whale washed up dead Thursday on the shores of New Jersey’s Long Island Beach, Fox News reported. It was the first of 2024 in New Jersey, following 14 whale deaths in the state in 2023.

In a post on X, SaveLBI, a nonprofit coalition raising concerns about what they say are negative impacts of offshore wind development, reported a Dwarf Sperm found dead on April 4 on the beach of Sullivan’s Island in South Carolina. They estimate the tally of dead whales since December 2022 is approaching 100.

Bob Stern, president of SaveLBI, in a separate post on X, called for a moratorium on offshore wind development in order for more research into the impacts of the industry to be conducted.

“These continuing whale deaths unfortunately confirm our analysis of the significant expected impact on marine mammals from the noise from these projects, starting with the vessel surveys, through the pile driving of foundations and with the higher operational noise from these larger turbines,” Stern said.

Wojick said offshore wind proponents exploit the indirect way in which offshore wind development kills whales to say the two are unrelated.

In its environmental impact statement for a wind project off the shores of New Jersey, BOEM explained, “It is possible that pile driving could displace animals into areas with lower habitat quality or higher risk of vessel collision or fisheries interaction. Multiple construction activities within the same calendar year could potentially affect migration, foraging, calving, and individual fitness…. The potential for biologically significant effects is expected to increase with the number of pile-driving events to which an individual is exposed.”

Wojick said that the projects are built, for obvious reasons, outside shipping lanes, which also happen to be the whales’ migration corridors. So, the whales impacted by pile-driving and other construction noise are going to swim to the east, where they encounter a busy shipping lane called the M-95, or they go to the west, where they encounter coastal barge traffic. He said both are deadly.

Demonstrating that a whale died when it was struck by a vessel as a result of avoiding sonar vessels or pile-driving activity is very difficult, Wojick said. As an analogy, he uses the example of a dog getting hit by a car after running into traffic to escape a firecracker thrown at it. The car killed the dog, but it was the firecracker that ultimately led to the animal’s death, and nothing about the animal’s injuries would point to the firecracker.

According to data from NOAA Fisheries in 2015, 33 whales were found dead on the beaches between North Carolina and Maine. The following year, the number jumped to 54, and in 2017, 89 whales were found dead. The numbers then began to decline, falling to a record low of 24 in 2022. Then, in the first six months of 2023, 48 whales were found dead along the Atlantic Coast. There are an estimated 360 right whales remaining.

Lisa Linowes, co-founder of the Save Right Whales Coalition, told Just The News in October that 2016 was when sonar vessels began mapping out the lease areas off the East Coast in preparation for the buildout of wind farms.

The Biden administration has approved eight major offshore wind projects as part of President Joe Biden’s goal of producing 30 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2030.

The conservative coalition’s lawsuit argues that the Biological Opinion issued by the National Marine Fisheries Service failed to adequately analyze the impacts of Dominion’s project on the endangered whales, and they are asking the court to set it aside and order a halt to work on the project.

With the media, the offshore wind industry and environmental groups denying any impacts to whales from offshore wind, it may be conservatives and independent researchers like Rand who end up saving the whales.

This article originally appeared at Pennsylvania Daily Star

Time To Save the Right Whales From the Green Left?

*Editor’s note: While, as Climate Realism has pointed out previously, here, whales are not threatened by climate change, right whales are confronted with more boat traffic, and are being driven into boat traffic by offshore wind development, especially via sonar testing.

From ClimateRealism

By Craig Rucker

There was a time back in the 1960’s and 70’s when a cause like “Save the Whales” was the exclusive domain of the political left.

But as Bob Dylan might say, “the times they are a changing”.

Three major “conservative” organizations – the National Legal Policy Center, Heartland Institute, and my organization, the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow – recently filed a major lawsuit in a Washington, D.C. federal court to save the Right Whale from facing potential oblivion.

Why aren’t the larger Green groups, unlike the grassroots ones, rallying around the efforts of these organizations to save Right whales?  Good question.  Perhaps it’s because the threat to the remaining 350 of them doesn’t come from Russian, Norwegian, or Japanese whaling vessels, as it did back in the 70’s.  Rather, it is from so-called “Green energy” in the form of offshore wind.  Right whales are being threatened by the Biden Administration’s fast-track plans to hurriedly place 30,000 MW of wind power generation off the Eastern coast, and doing so without the proper sort of environmental impact assessment they might otherwise perform for, say, offshore oil.

The collective decision by our outfits to take the issue of whale protection to Court came after two years of futile attempts to get the Biden Administration to listen. Offshore wind development threatens the nearly extinct North Atlantic Right Whale in various ways, and the government refuses to investigate.

The two agencies which share responsibility for making sure wind development does not harm whales include the Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), which oversees building wind facilities, and the Commerce Department’s National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS or NOAA Fisheries), which enforces the various laws to protect whales. Neither seems intent on doing their job.

In issuing its “biological opinion” last September, for instance, NMFS only examined the impact that each of these projects individually and in isolation would have on the North Atlantic right whale. The agency did not, as it should have, issue a comprehensive and cumulative analysis examining the combined harm which all the projects, together, would inflict on the whales during their annual migration path.

If it had done so, it would have uncovered that dangerous noises generated from several projects combine to create much louder and more dangerous circumstances for marine mammals than noises coming from just a single project. In fact, impacts can combine over time as well, such as when migrating Right Whales are repeatedly forced to go around a dozen wind facilities into heavily trafficked shipping lanes. The risk of being struck by a ship then becomes ten times greater than for a single project.

It’s likely for such reasons the Endangered Species Act specifically calls for assessment of cumulative impacts such as these, but the Biden Administration has ignored this requirement.

BOEM and NMFS say there is no evidence of a threat to whales. But this is just a coverup. The Right Whale population began its rapid decline in 2017, the year offshore wind development began in earnest. The Humpback Whale death rate tripled that very year and has remained abnormally high.

NMFS actually provides some of the strongest evidence. For every wind project they estimate the number of marine mammals by species that will be adversely affected by construction noise, something which they call “Level B Harassment”. For Right Whales the cumulative total of predicted Level B Harassments the government projects, and allows for, is already roughly twice the total population of the mammal … and growing.

Why is this a big deal?  Because such harassment can easily lead to a whale death. This can happen, for example, when the noise level of an operating turbine disrupts the navigation of a marine mammal, driving it into heavy ship traffic or fishing nets. BOEM and NMFS have refused to consider this deadly possibility, even for a single project like Dominion Energy’s windfarm off Virginia Beach, much less cumulatively. Meanwhile more and more whales are dying from ship strikes and fishing net entanglements as offshore wind development recklessly accelerates.

Harassment-caused death is merely one of many potentially deadly threats that BOEM and NMFS refuse to assess.  There are others we have cited, including loss of habitat, reduced food supply, and concentrated ship traffic.  This is why we are asking the Court to require that the government undertake such an investigation, as they are required to do so under the ESA, on all offshore wind projects cumulatively.

“Save the whales” is more than a slogan. It should be a directive our federal agencies are eager to carry out.  But if they won’t do it, then they shouldn’t be surprised to see lawsuits headed their way from every corner of the public interest – including from those of us on the right.

Craig Rucker is co-founder and president of the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow

Originally posted at RealClearPolicy, reposted with permission.

CFACT calls for banning offshore wind monopiles in favor of suction buckets to save whales

From CFACT

By David Wojick

Okay, this is not about sucking whales into giant buckets to take them away from offshore wind harm. Would that it were, but whales are way too big for that.

Instead, it is about a technology that can go a long way in reducing the harm to whales and other protected marine species. Simply put, suction buckets are a wind turbine foundation design that eliminates the need for those incredibly loud giant monopiles. Of all the ways that offshore wind threatens whales monopiles are the worst, while suction buckets are benign.

CFACT is calling for the banning of monopiles in favor of suction buckets. Mind you CFACT has made clear that they oppose offshore wind as destructive, ridiculously expensive, and completely unneeded. But if the Feds insist on having offshore wind it should sit on suction buckets, not monopiles.

To begin its call for banning monopiles CFACT recently posted comments to BOEM and NOAA via a proposal from the Beacon Wind project. Beacon is considering using suction buckets and wants to run some test cases. CFACT not only endorses these tests, it calls on this to be standard procedure on all offshore wind projects.

Suction bucket technology is simple and elegant. The bucket, less colorfully called a suction caisson, is a simple cylinder that is closed on one end. Installation is in two steps. First, the cylinder is set on the ocean floor with the open end down so it settles into the ocean floor a little way, thus sealing off the interior.

Then some of the water in the cylinder is pumped (or sucked) out. This reduces the internal pressure such that the external water pressure presses the cylinder into the sea floor. Pumping continues until the cylinder is fully embedded, where it can then be used as a structural foundation.

Instead of manually driving a pile, the ocean itself supplies the force. Three or four buckets are typically used to support a framework that then holds up the turbine tower.

The suction bucket technology has been around for many years, often used for anchoring offshore oil rigs. Using it for offshore wind is relatively new but Ørsted, the world’s biggest developer, has a 900 MW project underway off Taiwan so it is clearly feasible at the scale of US offshore projects.

Here is their description of suction bucket technology:

 

Bucket-Jacket_long-versionHerunterladen

Here are some central excerpts from the CFACT comments calling for a ban on monopiles in favor of suction bucket technology:

“Suction buckets are the perfect acoustic mitigation technology as installing them makes very little noise while installing monopiles is incredibly loud. Using them instead of monopiles will avoid the acoustic harassment of many thousands of marine mammals and other protected species.”

“This profound mitigation effect includes protecting the severely endangered North Atlantic Right Whale.”

“BOEM and NMFS should mandate that suction bucket technology be used for all fixed foundation offshore wind development, instead of piles, except where it is completely infeasible, which may be nowhere. At present, it appears that all of the proposed and in-process BOEM offshore wind projects with fixed foundations use deadly noisy monopiles. This use of monopiles must be replaced with suction bucket technology which is very quiet to install.”

“As part of this mandate, NMFS should cease authorizing thousands of marine mammal acoustic harassments per project from monopolies. It should also rescind all those authorizations where construction is not largely completed. Projects under construction using monopiles can switch to suction bucket foundations for their remaining turbines and substations.”

I hope others will join CFACT in calling for the banning of dangerously loud monopiles in favor of suction bucket technology. Surely the Marine Mammal Protection Act requires this switch.

Read CFACT’s full submission here

CFACT-Comments-on-Beacon-Wind-suction-buckets-on-Lease-OCS-A-0520Herunterladen

Offshore wind has a big up and down week

From CFACT

By David Wojick

The tumult in US offshore wind development has taken several steps lately, some forward, some not so much. Here is a quick overview of three serious events that are worth careful consideration.

First is the question of whether the developers will be able to bring forward their cost crisis and stick it to the ratepayers. As regular readers know, a lot of offshore wind project contracts with the client States have been pulled by the developers. They hope to come back with a higher price to cover their suddenly increased costs. The big Danish developer Orsted just pulled another contract in Maryland.

Well, the first of these new high-cost offers has indeed been accepted, in this case, by New Jersey. After all, the governor says, they want to go the impossible 100% renewables route as quickly as they can, making costs politically irrelevant. New Jersey ratepayers be damned.

There is a good chance that the other North Atlantic states will follow New Jersey, especially New York, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, which have huge offshore wind construction targets.

Possibly countering this big push for wind is a major new lawsuit that has just been filed. The complaint is here: https://www.scribd.com/document/700695015/Offshore-Wind-Lawsuit

This suit alleges something that is obviously true, having been widely discussed here at CFACT. The Federal agencies that have quickly issued the offshore wind permits have simply ignored the destructive environmental effects. This is especially true for the collective impact of combinations of nearby projects.

Thus, the argument is procedural rather than substantive. Plaintiffs are not asking the Court to rule on the environmental science, which Courts are reluctant to do. They just want the Feds to do the proper job as mandated by the applicable environmental protection laws, of which there are several.

The complaint has two dimensions of consideration. One is the adverse impact of wind development on fish and, therefore, on the fishing industry. Thus, one of the complainants is a fishing trade association. One of my favorite legal maxims is “Never argue substance when you can argue procedure.”

The other dimension is the adverse impact on endangered species, especially whales. One of the plaintiffs is the Save the Right Whale Coalition. Here, the narrow issue is the threat posed by enormous offshore wind development to the severely endangered North Atlantic Right Whale.

Speaking of enormous, here is a good picture of one of the unbelievably huge monopiles driven into the sea floor to hold up an offshore wind turbine generator. The pile dwarfs the people. https://www.offshorewind.biz/2023/07/03/eew-rolls-out-first-ocean-wind-1-monopile/

The noise of this pile driving is extremely loud, disrupting the lives of whales and other endangered species. This disruption is not only recognized by the Feds, it is specifically authorized by NOAA. The disruption is called harassment, and every offshore project has a pile driving harassment authorization, which typically includes thousands of hapless marine mammals.

That this systematic harassment can cause deadly behavior on the part of the thousands of harassed critters is one of the top ongoing complaints against offshore wind development. For example, scaring whales into heavy ship traffic where they can be struck and killed.

Which brings us to our third big event. The Feds have just released the final version of their so-called “North Atlantic Right Whale and Offshore Wind Strategy”. I say so-called because there is no strategy.

The Federal plan is to drive the thousands of piles on a bunch of big projects, many at the same time, and see what happens to the whales. The word “harassment” does not even occur in the document. Deadly harassment is simply ignored.

See https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/media-release/noaa-boem-announce-final-north-atlantic-right-whale-and-offshore-wind-strategy

If the Right Whales go extinct, there is no way to bring them back, so watching and waiting is not a protection strategy. This is the kind of systematic denial that the lawsuit calls out.

So there it is. The price of offshore wind may be going way up, but a lawsuit is asking for a more complete look at the adverse impacts. Meanwhile, the impact of offshore wind on severely endangered whales continues to be ignored by the development agencies.

The times they are a changing. Stay tuned to CFACT.

Ofgem to investigate claims of wind farms overcharging billpayers millions

Energy regulator Ofgem is investigating the claims that wind farms may have incorrectly added close to £51m to taxpayer bills since 2018.

A Bloomberg report found that 40 out of 121 studied projects overstated their output by ten per cent on average and one-sixth (27) wind farms were found to be overstating by at least 20 per cent. The CityAM has the story.

Ofgem said it was investigating the alleged behaviour and has asked the Energy System Operator (ESO) to look into the matter.

 “Ofgem will work closely with the ESO to consider all the facts and if it finds evidence of egregious action or market abuse, enforcement action will follow,” the spokesperson told City A.M.

“We will continue to work to protect market integrity and the best interests of consumers, as demonstrated by the recent cases we have concluded against generators who charged excessive prices behind transmission constraints.”

The report has reached government ears and parliamentary under-secretary of state for nuclear and networks Andrew Bowie said in response to its findings: “It is completely unacceptable to overcharge for people’s bills.

“British energy generators must operate at the highest standards,” he added.

Bloomberg caveated its report saying that while it is “impossible to determine precisely how much bill payers have had to pay due to such overstatements, but by assuming a similar rate of overestimation during the times that those 40 farms were paid to stop generating, consumers would have overpaid an estimated £51m ($65m) since 2018”.

Read the full story here.

Offshore wind and the stress on commercial fishermen

From CFACT

By Craig Rucker

Congressional Republicans are sounding the Mayday alarm this weekend to the grave challenges commercial fishermen face resulting from the Biden administration’s offshore wind agenda.

Offshore wind development is placing enormous stress on the American commercial fishing fleet, which may not survive these challenges. A trio of coastal lawmakers, Reps. Andy. Harris (R-Md.), Chris Smith (R.-N.J.), and Jeff Van Drew (R-N.J.) will explore offshore wind farm interactions at an upcoming hearing, which their colleagues and the public should heed.

President Joe Biden casts himself as a friend to American workers, but his poor treatment of fishermen and their communities puts the lie to this claim. Biden’s plan to produce 30 GW of offshore wind energy by the year 2030 is based solely on political goals, not any actual scientific investigation of our ocean’s offshore ecosystems. The science is unresolved. Coastal economies are forgotten. Energy and food security questions are ignored. And that’s just for starters.

There are many significant gaps in our understanding of offshore wind’s interactions with all facets of the marine environment, as an exhaustive research document from the Responsible Offshore Development Alliance (RODA) reflects.

What will the well-documented wind-wake effect do to ocean primary production – the upwelling and downwelling of the ocean – which is the building block of marine food webs? What of European modeling that shows increased sea surface temperatures relative to offshore wind turbines? Those models indicate that said warming mimics the effects of climate change and could extend up to 60 miles past lease areas. Would that hurt the ocean?

Wind turbines in the UK (such as the Thanet wind farm) have created continuous sand sediment plumes underwater that extend for miles and destroy fishing grounds. Could that happen in the U.S.? How do electromagnetic fields that subsea cables generate affect fish migration? Could it affect species development?

We don’t know the answers to these questions, and the administration has not made even a good-faith effort to do the science required before leasing began.

Despite the uncertain science, the administration is speeding ocean industrialization along to the benefit of foreign entities and governments. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) offers a 30% tax credit for projects that begin construction before 2026 as a way to turbocharge offshore wind development.

Nearly all the leaseholders are multi-national entities, in some cases majority-owned by foreign governments. For example, administration officials in November trumpeted federal approval of two offshore wind farms south of Long Island, Empire Wind 1 and Empire Wind 2. The developers behind these projects are British Petroleum and Equinor, a Norwegian government-owned energy company.

These projects, and others like them, will undermine and perhaps destroy local commercial fishing fleets coastwide. We know from experience that offshore wind infrastructure is not compatible with their fishing gear. Radar scatter and false targets create such dangers that fishermen cannot safely access lease areas if the entrance is allowed at all.

But instead of the Biden administration removing commercial fishing grounds from offshore wind lease areas first, industry backers in the U.S., such as Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), have crafted bills to instead compensate fishermen for lost catch.

But that doesn’t solve the problem. Fishermen don’t want a hand-out. Cutting checks for destroying a sustainable heritage industry is technocracy at its ugliest.

That approach will also force us to rely more heavily on farmed and wild-caught seafood from places like Russia and China with non-existent environmental and public health oversight. Didn’t the pandemic teach us that domestic food production and national food security matter?

Put simply: the Biden administration is offering tax credits to foreign-government-owned energy companies and/or foreign developers (or their U.S. subsidiaries) who will put US commercial fishermen out of work, seed dysfunction in US coastal fishing communities, risk destroying the ocean’s productivity and replace a sustainable domestic wild-caught high protein food source with subpar and sometimes unsafe foreign products.

Unfortunately, so far, many Republicans have missed the boat on this poignant story about the systematic destruction of our nation’s oldest industry at the hands of the Biden administration and Democrats’ offshore wind policy. But if they replace fishing with another resource user type, like logging, farming or ranching, they have probably lived it in their own state.

Reps. Harris, Smith, and Van Drew have been relentless in uncovering the multiple conflicts that offshore wind presents to our coastline and this country. Their colleagues and the public at large needs to understand quickly what Joe from Scranton’s administration is trying to do to this iconic industry, our wild-caught seafood supply, our nation’s safety, security and the ocean itself, before it’s too late.

Key Player In Biden’s Offshore Wind Push Withdraws From Deal With Blue State, Blames Inflation

From The Daily Caller

NICK POPE

CONTRIBUTOR

A major offshore wind developer announced Thursday that it withdrew from a deal with a state utility regulator for two offshore wind projects, citing inflation and other economic pressures.

Ørsted, a key corporate player in the Biden administration’s offshore wind agenda, has backed out of the Maryland Public Service Commission’s (MPSC) orders approving the company’s Skipjack 1 and 2 projects off the Maryland coast, the company announced Thursday. The company said that inflationary pressure, high borrowing costs and supply chain problems have combined to make the state’s subsidies economically unviable, but that it is not yet abandoning the projects and will continue to pursue permits, according to a regulatory filing with the MPSC.

“Today’s announcement affirms our commitment to developing value creating projects and represents an opportunity to reposition Skipjack Wind, located in a strategically valuable federal lease area and with a state that’s highly supportive of offshore wind, for future offtake opportunities,” David Hardy, the executive vice president and CEO of region Americas at Ørsted, said in a Thursday statement. “As we explore the best path forward for Skipjack Wind, we anticipate several opportunities and will evaluate each as it becomes available. We’ll continue to advance Skipjack Wind’s development milestones, including its construction and operations plan.”  (RELATED: Blue State Doubles Down On Offshore Wind After 2023’s Massive Failure)

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“The statutorily-mandated caps on the residential ratepayer impacts have very little room left,” an MPSC spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation. The state cannot raise those caps in the absence of legislative action, the spokesperson added.

The withdrawal is the latest sign of trouble for Ørsted, which pulled the plug on two major projects off the New Jersey coast in October 2o23 after many of the same underlying factors made those projects untenable. At one point, the company appeared poised to become a major beneficiary of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), President Joe Biden’s signature climate bill, but the mounting macroeconomic problems that have beleaguered the economy through his first term have weighed heavily on the company.

“Yesterday’s news from Ørsted is disappointing — the Skipjack project was an important component in advancing Maryland’s clean energy goals,” MPSC Chair Frederick Hoover said of the withdrawal. “However, the Commission remains optimistic about the future of the offshore wind industry in Maryland, and would note that the US Wind project continues to move through the federal approval process.”

The withdrawal is the latest sign of distress for the Biden administration’s offshore wind goals, especially if it turns out to be a precursor for the eventual collapse of the company’s Maryland projects. The White House is aiming for offshore wind to produce enough electricity to power more than 10 million American homes by 2030, but that goal now appears to be firmly out of reach, according to Reuters.

Neither Ørsted nor the White House responded immediately to requests for comment.

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