A pair of lawsuits filed recently by fishing interests aims to block the development of the nation’s first utility-scale offshore wind farm off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard.
Vineyard Wind received federal approval in May to erect 62 turbines on a stretch of the ocean floor 15 miles south of the island, enough to power about 400,000 homes in Massachusetts. It’s the first in a pipeline of projects the Biden administration hopes to approve to create 30 gigawatts of offshore wind energy before the end of the decade.
The latest suit seeking to halt the project was filed on Monday at the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. by the Responsible Offshore Development Alliance, a group of fishermen, seafood processors and other maritime businesses with members in New Bedford and Point Judith.
The lawsuit names the U.S. Department of the Interior, its Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and several other federal agencies as defendants, alleging they violated environmental laws by failing to consider the full impact of offshore wind development on the commercial fishing industry before issuing construction permits.
“The United States has short-cut the statutory and regulatory requirements that were enacted to protect our nation’s environmental and natural resources, its industries, and its people,” the lawsuit said.
In an interview, RODA’s executive director, Annie Hawkins, said the lawsuit will give fishermen an opportunity to look under the hood of the federal permitting process.
“Reviewing what happened in this project, and seeing if that was done effectively, should give us better standards about what needs to be done in other projects in the future,” Hawkins said.
Dozens of offshore wind farms, including several others proposed by Vineyard Wind in the same area, are currently seeking federal approval. Hawkins said RODA’s lawsuit aims to win fishermen more influence over whether those projects are approved.
RODA is also calling on the federal government to develop clearer guidelines for repaying fishermen who lose access to fishing grounds or damage their equipment on wind turbines.
As part of the negotiations for its first project, Vineyard Wind has set aside nearly $38 million to create a compensation fund for local fishermen.
Hawkins said that sum was negotiated through separate and inconsistent state regulatory processes in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. She said the fund also fails to compensate fishermen from other states who fish in the same area.
“There is no federal process for determining compensation,” Hawkins said. “It's really not transparent in the way that you would expect to have a science-driven estimate of what those impacts are, and there's a lot of dispute.”
Representatives from Vineyard Wind, the U.S. Department of the Interior and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management all declined to comment.
RODA’s lawsuit was filed about a month after a different group of seafood companies filed a similar suit in the same federal court.
A third group, Nantucket Residents Against Turbines, has filed a lawsuit seeking to block construction of Vineyard Wind I over concerns about the project’s impact on the dwindling population of North American right whales.
Ben Berke is the South Coast Bureau Reporter for The Public’s Radio. He can be reached at bberke@thepublicsradio.org. Follow him on Twitter @BenBerke6.
