A 4,928-page federal environmental review published Monday identifies the commercial fishing industry as a major stakeholder that would be affected by the construction of the proposed Revolution Wind offshore wind farm.
The report by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management states that, on average, about 290 commercial fishing boats visit the site of the proposed project each year, catching about $1 million worth of seafood there. By revenue, the area’s most lucrative species are lobsters, scallops, monkfish and squid. By poundage, the most prevalent species are skates and herring.
The proposed path of the undersea electric cable that would deliver power onshore could also impact fishermen on a smaller scale, according to the environmental review. The statement estimates about $360,000 of seafood is caught annually by commercial fishermen along the cable’s path.
In a press release announcing the release of the report, BOEM said it plans to issue a final decision on whether to approve Revolution Wind this summer.
Connecticut and Rhode Island have already inked power purchase agreements with the project’s developer, Orsted, a multinational energy company headquartered in Denmark. Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee called the completion of Revolution Wind’s environmental review a “major milestone” that brings the state closer to achieving its clean energy goals.
Once constructed, Revolution Wind’s turbines could generate up to 880 megawatts of electricity without burning fossil fuels, helping to reduce emissions that are already warming the planet and causing more extreme weather and natural disasters. Rising ocean temperatures also threaten commercial fisheries by causing marine species to migrate and impeding their ability to spawn and grow to maturity.
Revolution Wind is one of dozens of offshore wind farms along the East Coast that the federal government is already in the process of reviewing and permitting. Cumulatively, the Biden administration aims to approve enough offshore wind projects to generate 30 gigawatts of power before the end of the decade, a crucial part of their efforts to lead America through a clean energy transition. Two of these offshore wind projects, Vineyard Wind 1 and South Fork Wind, are already under construction a few miles away from the proposed site of Revolution Wind. Construction of a third utility-scale offshore wind project, Ocean Wind 1, is expected to begin this fall off the coast of New Jersey.
If constructed, Revolution Wind would include as many as 100 turbines towering close to 900 feet above the ocean. The electricity generated by the project would travel through cables buried three to six feet beneath the ocean floor, connecting to the power grid onshore at a substation at Quonset Point in Rhode Island. Several more wind farms are close behind Revolution Wind in the regulatory pipeline.
BOEM’s final environmental impact statement for Revolution Wind assesses the “potential biological, socioeconomic, physical, and cultural impacts” that could result from constructing the wind farm, operating it for 35 years, then disassembling it.
The statement itself is a lengthy review of another lengthy document: an 868-page construction and operations plan filed by the project’s developer in 2021, which refers to an additional 51 appendices with further information.
The public was given 45 days to comment on a draft version of the environmental impact statement in the fall of 2022. BOEM said it reviewed a total of 124 comments before issuing the final statement.
BOEM estimates commercial fishermen would suffer relatively modest financial losses even if they stopped fishing entirely in the proposed area for Revolution Wind, though turbines would be arranged a nautical mile apart from each other to encourage some level of fishing.
Lobster boats in New York, Connecticut and southern Massachusetts, for example, typically earn less than 3 percent of their revenue fishing at the main project site, according to BOEM’s analysis of data from the National Marine Fisheries Service. For scallopers in the same region, that share is less than a third of a percentage point.
But cumulatively, the impact of building dozens of offshore wind projects in fishing grounds up and down the East Coast has not been studied to the extent many fishermen are now demanding. Some commercial fishermen have already banded together to sue the federal government over its piecemeal approach to conducting environmental reviews of offshore wind projects, arguing that BOEM has failed to assess the true impact of offshore wind development on the fishing industry.
But offshore wind developers have also promised to usher in a new source of jobs for East Coast ports by using their facilities as hubs for the construction and maintenance of wind farms.
Orsted is still choosing between a variety of port facilities in different states as potential bases for the construction and eventual operation and maintenance of the Revolution Wind farm. The developer mentioned nine different port facilities between Virginia and Massachusetts as potential construction bases, including the Port of Providence and Quonset Point in Rhode Island and the New Bedford Marine Commerce Terminal. Orsted also referred to Quonset Point as a potential operations and maintenance hub along with Montauk, New York and secondary sites in Brooklyn and Port Jefferson in New York and Quincy, Massachusetts.
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.
