Maine Monitor: Fishermen endangered by offshore wind’s political power

Perhaps the Maine Monitor would consider revisiting onshore wind now that it has been almost 13 years since their founders, Naomi Schalit and John Christie, first investigated the subject. They might want to consider starting with Senator Angus King.

Turbines the height of 70-story skyscrapers will soon tower over East Coast fishing grounds. But government regulators with ties to offshore wind developers are downplaying the danger to the marine ecosystem and fishermen’s livelihoods.

by Will Sennott and Anastasia E. Lennon | April 23, 2023

EXCERPTS

Last May, Tommy Beaudreau touted the potential of renewable energy sources like offshore wind to an audience that included some of his government colleagues and former industry clients.

“This industry, this group of people in the room today, really are the key to unlocking that clean energy future,” Beaudreau, the deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior, proclaimed at a conference hosted by the American Clean Power Association, a lobbying group largely funded by offshore wind developers.

Just one year earlier, Beaudreau had been a corporate lawyer, earning part of his $2.4 million income from offshore wind developers. Then he was appointed to regulate the industry he was previously paid to represent. During Beaudreau’s tenure, developers including several of his former clients have gained preliminary or final approvals for an unprecedented expansion of offshore wind, despite repeated warnings from federal scientists about potential harms to marine life and the fishing industry.........................

 ...................Apparently left out of this cozy relationship is one keenly affected group: more than 1 million people in the U.S. who work in the seafood industry, including 158,811 commercial fishermen. Fishermen have been shouldering longer hours and more expenses as private equity takes over their industry. Now, they are grappling with the prospect that offshore wind farms will box them out of fishing areas and further imperil their livelihoods.

For generations, East Coast fishermen have plied the same waters where turbines the height of 70-story skyscrapers will soon be spinning. The Atlantic’s Outer Continental Shelf is comparatively shallow, making it easier to anchor turbines deep in the ocean floor. Steady winds blow through the entire year. But it’s also along the shelf’s ridges that currents mix and sunlight penetrates, allowing microorganisms and fish to flourish in a complex ocean ecosystem.

Federal scientists, the commercial fishing industry and industry regulators each have sounded the alarm about potential harm to fish spawning habits and about the lack of compensation for losses suffered by fishermen who will be displaced by the offshore wind industry. The Interior Department has ignored or downplayed those warnings........................

....................Dug up to 8 feet into the ocean floor, the trenches mark the first ocean ground broken on a large-scale offshore wind farm. Starting this year, 62 turbines will be raised, slightly more than a mile apart, each as high as 837 feet, taller than the John Hancock Tower, the tallest building in Boston. Below the surface, each turbine will be supported by 197- to 312-foot-tall steel piles, each up to 34 feet wide, according to Vineyard Wind’s approved construction plans..........................

.........................This month, a nearly 400-page report released by BOEM, NMFS and a fishing industry group said that the proliferation of wind farms is likely to impede regulators from collecting on-site data on the health of fish stocks. The lack of such information will result in “greater uncertainty” and “lost revenue to commercial and recreational fishermen,” the report said.

Fishermen worry that the lack of information on economic impact will favor developers in future negotiations over compensation. They also say the potential losses are a sum they never wanted to calculate in the first place.

“Fishing is my way of life. How do you put a price on somebody’s way of life?” Maine lobsterman Matt Gilley told wind developers, state and federal officials during a Zoom meeting in December. “There is no monetary compensation that will ever make it right.”

Please read the entire article at:

https://www.themainemonitor.org/blown-away-fishermen-endangered-by-...

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