Environmentalists face off against environmentalists over offshore wind projects 

Offshore wind turbines are pitting environmentalists against environmentalists—threatening to impede progress toward an ambitious U.S. goal for such projects.

The Energy Department estimates offshore wind turbines could produce as much as 20% of regional power needs along the densely populated Eastern Seaboard from Florida to Maine by 2050.

To reach that goal, the Biden administration had hoped to green-light 30 gigawatts from utility-scale offshore wind farms by 2030—enough to power nine million homes. That now seems wildly ambitious, as billions of dollars in projects have been canceled amid staggering cost overruns, soaring interest rates and supply-chain delays.

Added to these economic woes are persistent environmental concerns, as attested to by some recent federal lawsuits. In September, for example, Cape May County, N.J., and a coalition of regional environmental, fisheries and tourism groups sought to stop development of two utility-scale projects off the New Jersey coast.

The projects have since been canceled by the developer for economic reasons. But the lawsuit neatly summarizes environmentalists’ concerns with offshore wind farms in general. It contends that the farms present a dire threat to the endangered Atlantic right whale and sea turtles; that spinning turbines kill birds and interfere with seabird migrations; and that vast fields of turbines will disrupt economically vital commercial fisheries by blocking access to fishing grounds and disturbing bottom habitats critical to species like cod, haddock and lobster.

But environmental groups that support offshore wind, including the National Audubon Society, are rushing to its defense. Beyond the obvious benefit of producing millions of megawatts of carbon-free energy, offshore wind farms, when developed properly, can avoid harming marine species or interfering with commercial fisheries, these groups contend. And some developers are working on technologies that could even go beyond protecting marine life and help it prosper.

“While it takes time to understand and to get it right—and we’re all about that—we can’t put everything on hold for another decade waiting to see what might happen,” says Garry George, senior director for climate strategy for the National Audubon Society. “The biggest threat to whales and the world’s oceans is climate change.”
A North Atlantic right whale on Cape Cod Bay, in Massachusetts. Photo: Robert F. Bukaty/Associated Press

Tracking whales

Whales, in fact, are one focus of concern for the environmentalists fighting offshore wind projects. Two federal lawsuits filed against the Vineyard Wind I project 12 miles off the coast of Nantucket island in Massachusetts have been dismissed, but a group calling itself Nantucket Residents Against Turbines filed an appeal in October. The group contends that federal agencies have ignored new information about the dangers to the right whale, and that unless the project is halted it will send the whale “careening further down the road toward extinction.”

One theory is that noise from seismic surveys used to site turbines interferes with whales’ navigation mechanisms, potentially sending them into fatal collisions with ships. Inflaming matters are an unusual number of near-shore whale deaths off the Atlantic coast this year—at least 14 humpback whales, and an endangered right whale struck by a ship—that some say are linked to wind-farm seismic and construction activities.

Vineyard Wind’s developers say they have taken abundant precautions to prevent harm to whales. And the industry strongly denies sonar activities are to blame for whale deaths, citing a number of recent studies by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration published in 2022 that found no causation.

Meanwhile, a number of pro-wind groups, among them the Energy and Policy Institute, which calls itself a green energy “watchdog,” contend that the whale-death link to offshore wind is being fanned in part by fossil-fuel interests opposed to renewable energy progress.

Some wind-farm developers are going a step further, working on technology that would help actively avoid harm to whales. Off the New York state coast, sophisticated monitors are being deployed to track whale movements during turbine construction so as to avoid collisions with ships and construction machinery.

In the long term, such systems may vastly increase knowledge of whale migration patterns and behavior and help better protect whale populations, says Emily Woglom, executive vice president of the Washington, D.C.-based Ocean Conservancy, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting the ocean and its inhabitants.

The industry also is exploring technology to reduce bird deaths from collisions with offshore wind turbines. A technology being tested by Norwegian scientists may soon allow offshore wind turbines everywhere to be equipped with cameras and radar systems that identify approaching flocks of birds—and slow the speed of the blades to reduce the chances of deadly collisions. Land-based turbines in Wyoming are already equipped with a similar system designed to stave off collisions of bald eagles with turbine blades.

Efforts are also being made to keep wind turbines away from areas where they could endanger wildlife. By the time final decisions for offshore wind-farm leases are made by the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, “the high-conflict areas” where collisions with birds are most likely have largely been eliminated as options, says the Audubon Society’s George. And even then stakeholders—the public, fisheries and localized green groups, and others who might be interested—can voice objections if they feel if some vital issue hasn’t been addressed.

“We feel the system is working with adequate safeguards,” he says.

Working together

Pro-wind environmentalists point to a detailed mitigation agreement struck in mid-2022 between developers and three environmental groups for the South Fork Wind project as an example of how the industry takes environmental concerns seriously.

South Fork, a joint venture between Danish-based Orsted, the world’s largest wind-farm developer, and Eversource Energy, a Connecticut-based regional power supplier, is under construction 35 miles east of New York’s Long Island. Its 12 towering turbines will generate about 130 megawatts of power—enough to power approximately 70,000 Long Island homes—when it goes into operation early next year.

The agreement with the National Wildlife Federation, Natural Resources Defense Council and Conservation Law Foundation commits the developers and their contractors to “monitoring measures to help ensure right whales are not in close proximity to the construction site during construction activities, implement mitigation to reduce noise during piling, and evaluate other new monitoring technologies.”

The developers are testing technologies—infrared thermal underwater cameras and acoustic sensors, among them—that can detect and have the potential to track whales and possibly other forms of marine wildlife. Ocean Conservancy’s Woglom notes that these and several other technologies are undergoing independent testing by a group called the Regional Wildlife Science Collaborative, a consortium of federal and state agencies, environmental nonprofits, marine scientists and the offshore wind industry.

The collaborative’s goal, she says, is to make sure not only that these technologies work but also that they can be standardized and made available to all offshore wind projects going forward.

Policy makers are also pushing their own forms of mitigation. The New York state Energy Research and Development Authority, which oversees the state’s wind-development interests, recently added a provision that requires the developer that submits the winning bid for any of its offshore wind projects to add a $10,000 per megawatt fee to be used for marine environmental research.

With the state recently calling for bids on another four gigawatts of new projects in the not-too-distant future, that can potentially raise some $40 million “to do good regional science,” says Carl Lobue, a senior marine scientist for the Nature Conservancy who monitors New York state’s offshore wind ambitions. The state of Maine is considering a similar fee for future offshore wind projects there.

Saving land and sea

The Ocean Conservancy was part of a consortium of stakeholders—green groups, commercial fishermen, tourism officials and local, state and federal government agencies—that labored over the design, construction and operation of a wind farm off Block Island in Rhode Island for years before it gained approval. It’s the only utility-scale offshore wind farm in operation, and wind backers say it proves offshore wind’s potential. The day it went live in 2016, power from its five massive turbines began serving 17,000 island homes, replacing five carbon-belching generators.

The Block Island approval process, says Woglom, shows that, if done with care, utility-scale wind can be built “without compromising the environment.”

She notes that the Conservancy was formed a half-century ago with the specific mission of protecting whales, and says it wouldn’t lend itself to a project unless it felt that adequate protection was being taken. She accepts that industrial-scale development of the oceans—even for a good cause like climate-change mitigation—is disconcerting to many people, and states flatly, “We can’t kill the ocean to save the land.”

But she is confident the careful development of offshore wind will help to save both from climate change.

“We simply can’t meet our goals without offshore wind,” she says.