Two articles, reposted with permission, shine a critical light on the state off shore industrial wind generation...
I. by Bruce Mohl, CommonWealth Beacon August 18, 2024
THE NANTUCKET SELECT Board has released what might be described as a dispatch from the front lines of offshore wind development, a hot take on what it’s like to be a municipality trying to co-exist with the nation’s first industrial-scale wind farm.
The hot take takes the form of answers to 25 frequently asked questions, some of which merely lay out the existing regulatory landscape Nantucket finds itself in while others criticize federal regulators for prioritizing national concerns over those of local communities.
First off, the Select Board makes clear to residents that it has no permitting authority over offshore wind farms. “Local governments do not control federal and state-level energy/climate policies, and Nantucket does not have the ability to authorize or deny offshore wind energy development in federal waters,” the board said. “There is a perception that the town does have this control, and that is simply not true.”
Despite the lack of authority over offshore wind farms, the Nantucket officials say the fallout from the projects on local communities can be enormous, extending beyond the foam and fiberglass from a broken wind turbine that has been washing up on the island’s beaches.
The board said it worries most about the impact wind farms could have on tourism in coastal communities. “If even a small percentage of regular visitors to these communities decide not to return because they do not prefer formerly natural and historic environments now dominated by hundreds of turbines, our communities will lose thousands of jobs,” the board said. “Indeed, the number of jobs at risk far out-numbers the relatively small number of well-paying jobs tied to the temporary period of wind farm construction.”
The board said the loss of visitors could have a ripple effect on taxes that support local government. “Those who say there are no risks posed by industrialization of ocean viewsheds to heritage-tourism and our sense of place have no reliable data to back their claims and, in some cases, possess data showing the threat is quite real,” the document states.
The Select Board sharply criticizes the main federal offshore wind regulator, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, or BOEM. “We do not believe BOEM is fulfilling its duty,” the board said. “We have seen little balance in BOEM’s permitting approach to offshore wind, which significantly favors industry developers, including foreign-government owned developers, over the legitimate concerns of US coastal communities and Tribal Nations.”
The board’s key concern is that BOEM is failing to take into account the cumulative impact of all the wind farms being planned. “This ‘segmenting’ of projects denies the public the opportunity to fully understand and weigh the scaled-up harms of industrialization of large swaths of our near-shore oceans,” the board said. “Segmenting is a tactic employed by the fossil fuel industry to avoid scrutiny, and we are disappointed to see BOEM enabling it in the green energy context.”
The board said BOEM is supposed to analyze the potential harm a wind farm may cause and then develop a plan to mitigate that harm; instead, BOEM is approving wind farms and then planning mitigation after the fact. “By shortchanging and reordering its process for offshore wind, BOEM is creating a bad precedent for all industry,” the board said.
“While everyone must be prepared to sacrifice to battle climate change, it is a false choice to say that the only way to timely pursue strategies for climate change is to sacrifice the character and economic sustainability of historic communities,” the board said.
Nantucket officials said they felt let down by BOEM so they negotiated directly with the developers of Vineyard Wind to mitigate the impact of the wind farm. The officials said the wind farm company was cooperative, with the CEO sitting down face to face to meet with residents.
The Nantucket Select Board said it won a number of concessions to minimize the impact of the project on its “historic viewshed,” including moving the closest row of turbines further away from Nantucket and installing a system that would turn on turbine lights only when an aircraft is in the vicinity, a practice that is now standard on most wind farm projects. The Select Board said it also negotiated roughly $34.4 million in mitigation payments over 30 years, far more than the $230,000 BOEM had negotiated.
BOEM officials had no immediate comment when asked about the claims of the Nantucket Select Board.
This article first appeared on CommonWealth Beacon and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
II. State Officially Throws Out Ocean Wind Offshore Projects
The Board of Public Utilities formally vacated orders that approved Orsted's offshore wind farms after a settlement with the state.
The Board of Public Utilities formally vacated orders that approved Orsted's offshore wind farms after a settlement with the state.
OCEAN CITY, NJ — The New Jersey Board of Public Utilities formally vacated all orders approving the Ocean Wind One and Ocean Wind Two projects owned by Orsted that were originally set to be constructed off the coast of Ocean City.
Cape May County officials celebrated this decision as a victory, noting that it makes it more difficult for other offshore wind projects to utilize the initial lease area.
The news follows developer Orsted pulling out of the projects suddenly last year, citing supply chain issues. However, county officials believe the strength of local opposition to the projects also played a major part in the decision.
The State of New Jersey agreed to let Orsted keep $175 million in escrow funds in exchange for vacating the BPU Orders. Cape May County’s actions before the Appellate Division and the Federal District Court remain active at this time.
“Today is a very important day in our ongoing opposition to these environmentally destructive offshore wind projects,” said Cape May County Commission Director Len Desiderio.
“As we have seen in Nantucket over the past few weeks, these industrial electricity-generating facilities represent an unacceptable threat to our environment and, consequently, to our local economy,” Desiderio said. “In Nantucket, the disintegration of a single turbine blade has led to tens of thousands of pounds of fiberglass, foam, industrial adhesive, and other contaminants in the water and washing up on local beaches, which have had to be closed. We cannot allow that to happen to Cape May County.”
“They say you can never know which straw will break the camel’s back,” said former New Jersey Superior Court Judge and Cape May County Special Counsel for Offshore Wind, Michael Donohue. “But we can know for sure that the County of Cape May and its partners in the fishing and tourism industries as well as respectable environmental groups certainly contributed to Orsted’s decision to abandon the Ocean Wind industrial offshore wind projects. And that decision led directly to their agreement to have the Board of Public Utilities rescind their approvals for Ocean Wind One and Ocean Wind Two. We have informed the Appellate Division of the New Jersey Superior Court that we believe that there are still Constitutional and conflicts-of-interest questions that they should hear. We are also likely to amend our Federal Court filings since the actions of the NJBPU would appear to have nullified Orsted’s federal permits.”
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