By Michael Kuser

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — New England renewable energy advocates are skeptical of federal officials’ claims to be acting in the public interest by delaying the final permits for the Vineyard Wind project in Massachusetts, raising the question of whether the Trump administration is slow-walking offshore wind approvals.

Early this summer, the project’s biggest obstacle appeared to be local, after the Edgartown Conservation Commission denied a permit for the project’s cables to come ashore on Martha’s Vineyard. (See “Land Ho is Wind Woe,” New England Officials Speak on Grid Transformation.)

But challenges rose to the federal level last month when the Bureau of Ocean Management announced it would postpone a final environmental impact statement and extend the project’s permitting timeline to conduct an expanded analysis of “cumulative impacts” from the multiple offshore projects proposed for New England.

Participants at a Sept. 10 Environmental Business Council of New England (EBCNE) meeting on Vineyard Wind questioned the federal government’s rationale for the delay.

“For years, we asked for cumulative impacts in things like port development, LNG facility development, energy development in general; and FERC said, ‘No, we never do that; we never ask how many ports do we really need. … One port rises and falls on its own merits,’” said the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society’s Curt Spalding, a former EPA regional administrator for New England during the Obama administration.

Spalding said the federal review under the National Environmental Policy Act “is not simply a written, hard and fast scientific process. The key decisions are made along the way by regulators that obviously look at all the data that NEPA generates. But let’s be honest: It’s a very politicized process in a lot of cases.”

As evidence of an overall strategy to delay development of renewable energy, and in particular offshore wind, Spalding pointed to apparent short-staffing at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which he said “has not been given any resources to do all the reviews that we’re talking about. It’s a joke; it’s absurd. They’re being asked to review I don’t know how many projects, but they’re given no resources.”

Every Hour Matters

A joint venture between Avangrid Renewables and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, Vineyard Wind in May 2018 won a contract to supply Massachusetts with 800 MW of offshore wind energy. Later that year it won another lease area off Martha’s Vineyard in an auction conducted by BOEM. The company last month bid for the state’s second solicitation by offering several options on up to 800 MW in additional offshore wind energy.

Rachel Pachter, vice president of permitting affairs at Vineyard Wind, described the path to construction of the large project, which could ultimately generate as much as 3,200 MW. Asked about the BOEM delay, Pachter said, “The issue as we understand it is not specifically at all about Vineyard Wind. … This is about the other projects and their development, and them wanting to do a more comprehensive cumulative impacts analysis of all of those in order to better understand where the industry’s headed.”

“So they are not coming back to you asking for more information?” EBCNE President Daniel Moon asked.

“They’re coming back and asking for money, since we pay for a third-party contractor, but it’s really about future projects,” Pachter said. “They actually have all the information they need on Vineyard Wind.

“An important way to think about offshore wind farms, the way we think about them, is they’re really, really big logistics projects,” she said. “What matters most to us is how we can build this most efficiently, spend the least amount of time offshore and get everything done before the [winter] weather.

“Our windows to work are extremely critical. You can lose an entire year, and when we have vessels with half-a-million to million-dollar [per] day rates, these are all extremely critical to construction of the project. Every hour matters to us. And on the opposite side, making space for the right whale, to make sure that’s protected.”

Andrew Gottlieb, executive director of the Association to Preserve Cape Cod, said that “moving the goalposts of the regulatory process is nothing more than a cynical attempt by the administration to delay offshore wind development in general.”

“The senior levels of the federal government are really being captured by oil-and-gas-industry interests who see the potential for large-scale wind being a threat to wringing out the last nickel of what would otherwise be known as stranded assets,” Gottlieb said.

Responding to the claims of critics, BOEM spokesperson Tracey Moriarty told RTO Insider: “Because BOEM has determined that a greater build out of offshore wind capacity is reasonably foreseeable — more than what was analyzed in the initial draft [environmental impact statement] — BOEM has decided to supplement the draft EIS and solicit comments on its revised cumulative impacts analysis.”

NOAA backed BOEM’s view, asserting that the agency “is committed to ensuring fishing activities and offshore renewable energy interests can operate in harmony,” according to agency spokesperson John Ewald. “We appreciate BOEM’s desire to strengthen their analysis and more fully address the cumulative impacts of offshore wind activities through development of a supplemental environmental impact statement.”

NOAA did not address the contention that it has inadequate resources to expedite project reviews.

Good Jobs, Good Boats and more

The EBCNE meeting also featured a panel that provided a flavor of the logistical complexity of building a wind farm.

“Throughout this multiyear review period, there has been a considerable amount of attention focused on Vineyard Wind because they are the first project, the project that’s farthest through permitting,” said panel moderator Maria Hartnett, of consulting firm Epsilon Associates, which has been working on Vineyard Wind for two years.

Priscilla Brooks, vice president and director of ocean conservation at Conservation Law Foundation, said, “Our approach to offshore wind has been one of wanting to see this industry advance, with a focus on siting projects … how to site them in an environmentally sensitive way and also ensure that they get a fair environmental review.”

Jill Rowe, director of ocean science at consultancy RPS Group, which has been working with the project since 2017, said the company has done “many of their [construction and operations plan] sections, have provided permitting support … but there’s a lot of science.” She said RPS has brought its experience from the oil and gas industries to the offshore world.