Fishermen Grapple With Offshore Wind’s
Complicated Issues

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Massachusetts has five adjacent lease blocks. They are leased to Baystate Wind/Orsted-Eversource, Vineyard Wind, Equinor, and Mayflower Wind/Shell. Baystate and Vineyard Wind have been conducting survey activities. Vineyard Wind is the only company engaged in state permitting. That project includes 84 turbines with two offshore export cables. In August, a bill was finalized that granted private use of public lands to land the cable underneath a public beach.

Report on Rhode Island Wind Activities to the ASMFC

At its Aug. 8 meeting in Arlington, Va., the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) hosted a workshop to get an overview of offshore wind activities and the issues and opportunities posed by the co-existence of wind power projects and the fishing industry.

The workshop was convened because it had become apparent that numerous wind energy projects were coming down the road and yet there was an information gap between states, and between state and federal interests, said ASMFC chairman Jim Gilmore.

States are struggling with similar issues and are in the position to coordinate efforts, he said.

The jurisdictional perspective is unique, he noted. The projects are in federal waters, but state fishermen fish in the areas where the projects will be constructed, and transmission lines will cross into state waters to reach shore. In addition, the issues involve a variety of regulatory agencies.

“The level of awareness and engagement on wind issues differs among the states,” said Mike Pentony, regional administrator for the Greater Atlantic Regional Fisheries Office (GARFO). Wind development will impact fishing activity, Pentony said. The workshop was a first step toward sharing information and resources toward understanding, responding to, and perhaps mitigating potential impacts.

“We’re trying to achieve a marine environment that is not offshore wind or fisheries,” said Andy Lipsky of the Northeast Fisheries Science Center (NEFSC). Instead, he continued, “We’re looking at how do we co-exist together so it’s fisheries and offshore wind, and how do we responsibly develop and advance sustainable, renewable energy as we responsibly manage and advance sustainable fisheries in bringing food to our tables?”He added, “Both are critically important.”

The Northeast is on the threshold of “a very large-scale effort to install offshore renewable energy,” Lipsky said. “They’ll be in the water for decades.”

Turbine life span is 20 or more years, he added. Stakeholders are in an excellent place to think about and apply lessons learned from management of natural resources to the development of the wind industry, he said. Developing responsible offshore energy and maintaining critical fisheries and habitats will require coordinated efforts, he said.

“Whether you want to be doing it or not, it’s here,” Lipsky said. “And in order to be effective, we have to work together.”

The lead regulatory agency for the offshore wind industry is the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM). Projects are in various degrees of development, with projects in the pipeline into 2027. That doesn’t include potential activity associated with evolving technology. Currently, the projects in development are using technology that fixes them to the seafloor, which limits the depth of water where the turbines can be placed.

“But the depth constraint goes away when we’re developing floating turbines,” Lipsky explained.

Wind development intersects with all areas that fall under NMFS’ purview. That includes fisheries, fishing communities, marine mammals, endangered species such as the North Atlantic right whale, essential fish habitat, aquaculture, and marine ecosystems.

Although there are no commercial-scale offshore aquaculture projects, that concept is also in development and will likely share some of the same challenges as offshore wind, he said.

NEFSC has worked collaboratively with BOEM for a number of years, sharing data on fisheries and habitat connected with potential lease areas.

In terms of other interactions during construction and during eventual decommissioning, which would happen 20 years or so after a project is constructed, it’s worth paying attention to numerous potential effects, he said.

“In many of these cases, we don’t know what the impacts will be,” he said. “That’s why a scientific understanding of construction, operations, and decommissioning of these projects is important.”

Types of effects will include seafloor disturbance, sediment suspension and deposition during construction, dredging and cabling to bury submarine cables, noise from pile-driving to secure the base foundations of these very large structures, vessel traffic, lighting, displacement of fishing effort, and electromagnetic fields from buried cable.

It’s likely that some fishing activity, such as pair trawling, would be constrained from the project areas.

“There’s going to be exclusion just by the nature of putting structures in areas that are currently fished,” said Lipsky. The agency is concerned about effects on marine mammals during construction and operations, he said. That includes changed behaviors and potential stress due to things like noise and ecosystem changes. Then there will be cumulative impacts due to multiple projects constructed and operating over the next 27-plus years.

The projects are also expected to impact NEFSC’s fishery surveys, essential for stock assessments.“It looks like our large survey vessels and the way we conduct aerial surveys may face disruption,” he said. “We’re just beginning to tackle this issue.”

Given the pace and scale of development, it’s been a challenge to engage stakeholders and coordinate discussions, due to the large region in question.

“We have individual developers and states investing in research and monitoring either at the individual site level or at the topic level, without a regional framework that links all these efforts together in a coherent ways,” Lipsky said.

Lipsky and others said the planning process would benefit from having a coherent regional framework that provides a forum for shared information, called the workshop a good start toward that goal.

“We need to achieve co-existence,” Lipsky said. “We want fisheries and fishing communities to occupy the same space, with the same importance, as offshore wind energy.”

“Fishing activity will most likely be excluded on a grand scale, especially the trawl fleet,” predicted ASMFC member Eric Reid. The fishing industry, Reid said, is already paying for wind development in terms of the time needed to understand the issues and attend meetings. “The problem is, this stuff changes so fast,” he continued, referring to wind technology. “In New England, it’s happening and it’s happening fast, and it’s pretty scary.”

Annie Hawkins, executive director of the Responsible Offshore Development Alliance (RODA) and interim director of the Responsible Offshore Science Alliance (ROSA), discussed fishing industry engagement on the topic.

RODA’s growing membership spans Maine to North Carolina and includes over 125 vessel owners, plus fishing associations, dealers, and processors, together representing 30 federal and state-permitted fisheries. Stakeholders on the West Coast have indicated interest in the group, Hawkins said.

In March, RODA signed a memorandum of understanding with NMFS and BOEM that identifies areas of mutual interest, promotes engagement of the commercial fishing industry in offshore wind development process, commits to incorporate fishing expertise in planning and development of wind projects, and supports development of regional research and monitoring efforts.

RODA recently got a joint industry task force up and running, she said. The task force is designed to promote communication between wind developers and the fishing industry. “We’re still hearing a lot of concern from people on one side or the other that they expressed something that wasn’t heard,” she said.

The task force held its first meeting in June and is now in the process of appointing 15 to 20 fishing industry members, she said. “A lot of the issues that come up with state and federal processes are applicable broadly to the whole region and to all fisheries,” Hawkins said. “We think this is a good way to increase efficiency.”

The goal is to identify areas of cooperation and solutions to areas of conflict. RODA has participation from five of the largest lease-holding developers.

RODA is a founding partner of the Responsible Offshore Science Alliance, another new organization dedicated to advancing regional research and monitoring, increase data on fisheries and wind development, and increase understanding of the effects of wind energy development on fisheries and their coastal and ocean ecosystems. ROSA is modeled after public-private science consortia such as ASMFC’s Scientific and Statistical Committee and the Gulf of Mexico Alliance – groups that look at bigger ecosystem problems with the involvement of scientists and affected industries, she said.

The first ROSA meeting was held in Philadelphia, Penn., in July, with over 50 participants, including the fishing industry, renewable energy developers, and state regulators. It’s expected that ROSA will allow for better regional coordination in order to greatly reduce scientific uncertainty, she said.

Anthony DiLernia, a member of the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council (MAFMC), said that, from the perspective of a fisherman, he was encouraged by the workshop. In 2005, he recalled, he was a charter boat captain operating in New York Harbor. A tidal power company was looking to install turbines where the currents were strongest. That was also where striped bass were most abundant.

“All of a sudden I found myself, as a single charter boat captain, having to react to this proposal,” he said. Having navigated the regulatory process previously, he found the right agency. But, he continued, “At that time, I was one fisherman all alone. What’s happening here is a lot different now. The states are realizing that there are energy companies that will be putting things in the water that will affect their fishermen. The fishermen today are not going to be by themselves.”Added MAFMC member Joe Cimino, “It’s hard to wrap our heads around the magnitude of what’s happening.”