Newport’s Energy & Environment Commission concluded its three-part series about offshore wind on Aug. 15, with moderator Avery Robertson leading panelists representing Climate Action Rhode Island’s Yes to Wind campaign, the Iron Workers Local 37 union, and the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management in a discussion about the ethics and economics of offshore wind development.
Nick Horton, a volunteer with Climate Action Rhode Island, opened his remarks by asking the audience to raise their hands if they considered themselves environmentalists, whether they cared about whales, and if they cared about the health of Rhode Island’s fisheries now and in the future. Most people raised their hands to all three. He then asked the room to raise their hands if they planned on cutting their personal energy usage by 90 percent within the next few years. Nobody raised their hand.
He proceeded to make the point that Rhode Island’s grid is largely dependent upon the fracking of natural gas in other states as its main power source. Horton said he supports the industrial scale development of offshore wind not only because it provides an alternative to modes of fossil fuel production, such as fracking, which negatively impact the environment, but also because the pollution caused by fracking and coal-fired power plants increases cancer rates and other health issues in other communities.
David Langlais, the business manager for the Iron Workers Local 37 union, was openly agnostic about environmentalism in the abstract, though he did state that the clear-cutting of thousands of acres of forest to install solar panel arrays in northern Rhode Island bothered him more than the prospect of offshore turbines.
Langlais gave his unequivocal support for the construction of any type of energy infrastructure, renewable or otherwise, which would bring union jobs to Rhode Island. He noted that Iron Workers Local 37 was in favor of the failed proposal to construct a massive natural gas power plant in Burrillville in 2019.
Local 37, which covers all of Rhode Island, southeastern Massachusetts, Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket and parts of Connecticut along the Rhode Island border, and represents over 600 workers, has been involved in the offshore wind development process since the beginning. Langlais said the workers he represents helped build the nation’s first five offshore wind turbines off the coast of Block Island, and that the Revolution Wind and Vineyard Wind projects have thus far created over 200 jobs for local men, women and apprentices.
Julia Livermore, the deputy chief of the Division of Marine Fisheries at RIDEM, walked the audience through the dense permitting process all offshore wind projects must work through in order to gain approval and actually construct turbines and offshore conversion stations. She gave out a 2022 map of the entire Rhode Island and Massachusetts offshore lease area, a visual aid of the permitting process, an operational timeline of the wind farms, and a large multi-page table detailing the permitting requirements of every state and federal agency involved in the process.
Livermore stressed that RIDEM serves in an advisory capacity in the process. The federal Bureau of Ocean and Energy Management (BOEM) holds jurisdiction over federal waters, the Rhode Island Coastal Resources Management Council (CRMC) having jurisdiction over state waters, and the federal Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) is the lead regulator for operational wind farms.
After a handful of voices dominated much of the allotted public Q&A time at last week’s panel, Robertson attempted a new strategy, passing out notecards for audience members to write out questions. But one woman stepped up to the panelists’ table to unveil pieces of fiberglass and foam debris from the broken Vineyard Wind turbine blade, which she had brought with her in a pizza box. She later told Newport This Week that she had collected the debris at a members-only beach in Westport, Massachusetts, called Elephant Rock Beach.
A brief but chaotic verbal altercation with other audience members ensued, with one man snatching the debris from her hands as he shouted at her to stop being disruptive. The Newport police department has since put out a social media post asking the public to help them identify the man.
After order was restored, Robertson was able to get through about 10 of the audience’s written questions.
Horton was asked about the biggest misconception about offshore wind. He refuted widespread claims linking offshore wind development to an increase in whale deaths on the East Coast. He brought copies of an article written by URI professor Robert Kenney in the 2023 edition of Rhode Island Naturalist, which refutes the claim that offshore wind development is connected to increased humpback whale mortalities.
While many people believe the whales’ navigation abilities are being affected by the seismic activity of offshore wind surveying and construction, Kenney, a marine research scientist at the URI Graduate School of Oceanography as well as a board member and database manager for the North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium, pointed out in the article that humpback whales and other baleen whales do not use sonar to navigate.
Some NOAA scientists, including Andrew Lipsky, who was a panelist at the Aug. 8 discussion, have expressed concern about the effect of the wind farms on endangered North Atlantic Right Whales, but not because of their sonar. In a May 2022 letter to BOEM, Lipsky and 13 other NOAA scientists expressed concern that the wind farms could negatively affect the abundance of plankton, which right whales rely on as their main food source.
NOAA has consistently stated that no humpback whale deaths have been tied to offshore wind activity. At a Jan. 18, 2023 NOAA press conference about East Coast whale strandings, a spokesperson stated NOAA has been monitoring an unusual level of humpback mortalities since 2016. Necropsies were conducted on approximately half of the 178 humpback whales that have died since then, and 40 percent of those necropsies revealed evidence of either a ship strike or gear entanglement.
