Federal regulators have issued their first-ever environmental impact evaluation of multiple offshore wind lease areas.
The regional assessment of six potential projects in the New York Bight is an effort to improve efficiency and smooth the path toward the Biden administration’s goal of 30 GW of offshore wind installed by 2030.
The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) announced Jan. 8 that the draft programmatic environmental impact statement (PEIS) would be published in the Federal Register on Jan. 12, at which point a public comment period will begin.
A cluster of lease areas on the Outer Continental Shelf from Cape Cod, Mass., to Cape May, N.J., has been the focus of early efforts to build wind power in the United States.
There are many unknowns because there is virtually no operational experience with offshore wind in this hemisphere. BOEM has been preparing environmental impact statements — exhaustive reviews taking many months to complete and filling many hundreds of pages — for each project individually.
The PEIS announced Jan. 8 is different: Rather than a single project, it covers six lease areas totaling nearly a half-million acres stretching 75 nautical miles north-to-south in the New York Bight. The PEIS paves the way for future individual reviews.
In its conclusions, however, the PEIS is similar to the other environmental impact statements BOEM has prepared for the individual wind projects off the Northeast coast. It presents a range of possible positive and negative effects from the six projects individually, as a group of six and cumulatively with all the other offshore wind development proposed for the region.
As with most of the offshore impact statements, the predictions are a bit nebulous: maybe a minor impact, maybe a major impact, perhaps beneficial, perhaps detrimental.
The PEIS does firmly predict that all the wind farms in the New York Bight would have a major detrimental impact on ships approaching the Port of New York and other vessel traffic, cultural resources, and scientific research and surveys.
This last impact has been flagged as a problem. Not only are the effects of offshore wind development not fully understood at this point, but also, the construction itself will impair the ability to track those impacts.
But protecting the ocean remains a primary stated goal of BOEM as it carries out the administration’s directives.
BOEM Director Elizabeth Klein said in a news release Jan. 8: “We look forward to receiving additional public comment to inform this first-ever regional environmental review of offshore wind energy development on multiple leases. We are confident that this comprehensive approach can create efficiencies for future project-specific wind energy reviews in a manner that protects the ocean environment and marine life.”
The wind lease numbers covered in the PEIS, and the associated project or leaseholder names, are OCS-A 0537, Bluepoint Wind; OCS-A 0538, Attentive Energy; OCS-A 0539, Community Offshore Wind; OCS-A 0541, Atlantic Shores Offshore Wind Bight; OCS-A 0542, Leading Light Wind; and OCS-A 0544, Excelsior Wind.
The six areas hold the combined potential for as much as 7 GW of electric generation.
They are in relatively close proximity to the Empire Wind projects, the canceled Ocean Wind projects, and the Atlantic Shores projects, all of which are closer to the New Jersey and New York coasts.
