Fishermen, environmentalists, labor unions and local residents broadly support the 132-MW South Fork Wind Project being built for the Long Island Power Authority by a joint venture between Ørsted and Eversource Energy.

“We’re anxious to see the South Fork project go forward,” said Roger Clayman, the executive director of the Long Island Federation of Labor, which represents 250,000 workers.

Clayman made his comments Thursday at the second of three hearings being held by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. The agency will hold its final virtual public meeting Tuesday and accept comments submitted or postmarked no later than Feb. 22 before completing its final environmental impact statement.

“It addresses some major concerns on Long Island, first of all climate change;­ we’re very sensitive as an island to what the impacts will be,” Clayman said. “Secondly, it brings the South Fork what they voted for, which is wind power; and third is job creation on a very large scale.”

The agency in January released a draft environmental impact statement (DEIS) on the proposed wind farm, finding mostly negligible to moderate adverse impacts from the project, as well as some generally minor beneficial impacts. (See BOEM Sees Moderate Impacts from South Fork OSW Project.)

Fish Facts

Ørsted and Eversource are proposing to build up to 15 wind turbines, with a capacity of 6 to 12 MW per turbine, located approximately 30 nautical miles east of Montauk Point.

“The fish I catch today as a charter captain are vastly different in type and abundance due to climate change impacts, so the fishing industry needs renewable energy to help them stem the tide,” said Dave Monti, board member of the American Saltwater Guides Association and vice chair of the Rhode Island Marine Fisheries Council.

The developers have acknowledged the importance of private recreational fishing, but private angling is not covered in the DEIS, he said.

“It’s not the developers’ job to report who is fishing in a wind farm area and what they catch, but it is rather the job of [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] and BOEM to make sure that recreational fishing is covered in surveys,” Monti said. “Recreational anglers are supportive of offshore wind as long as the wind farms are developed responsibly, with research before, during and after construction.”

Europe shows greater fish abundance inside its wind farms, and at the Block Island Wind Farm off Rhode Island, recreational fishing “is good, perhaps even a bit better than before the wind farm, even though fishing pressure in the area has increased,” Monti said.

Rich Hittinger of the Rhode Island Saltwater Anglers Association expressed concern that sound waves from pounding the 31-foot diameter piles into the seabed would damage fin fish within a nearly 6.5-nautical-mile radius.

“I’m just wondering if this is actually true, and if so, I’d like to know what is the anticipated radius of expected fin fish mortality,” Hittinger said. “I’m sure it would be much smaller, but I’d like to know what that is.”

Matt Gove from Surfrider Foundation, a national ocean advocacy group, said that his group hasn’t seen anything in the DEIS to keep it from supporting the project, but that “we’re really hoping to see some leadership from BOEM here on monitoring. … If we don’t have a standardized monitoring to have standardized data across all these projects, we’ll have no idea if any impacts are happening that we can’t see.”

Extension Cords

The preferred landfall site for the facility’s interconnection line is a parking lot at the southern end of Beach Lane in Wainscott, Long Island.

Mike Mahoney of Wainscott, who opposes the project, said that Beach Lane is busy and narrow, while the alternative landing site, Heather Hills, is wider and probably safer. (NOTE: An earlier version of this article stated incorrectly that Mahoney supports the project.)

Site specifics aside, Mahoney said, “The cost for the electricity for ratepayers in Suffolk County will be five times higher than any other location in the state of New York, and that concerns me greatly, especially when the adjacent wind farm, Sunrise, is being paid for by all the ratepayers in the state. … I know that that’s the agreement that LIPA and our state has signed, but I hope that you have input and can go back and suggest that they really look at that.”

David Posnett, a retired medical doctor in East Hampton who works with Win with Wind, an independent advocacy group on the South Fork, said he had a comment for all those who are worried about the “nefarious cable” running under the seabed and coming ashore.

The 660-MW Neptune Cable has been feeding power into Long Island from New Jersey without incident since 2007, and LIPA imports power from New England on the 330-MW Cross Sound Cable. Power also comes in on two older cables owned jointly by the New York Power Authority and Consolidated Edison, the 600-MW Y49 cable and the 400-MW Y50 cable, which also run under the sound to Long Island, he said.

“We already have giant extension cords running to Long Island,” Posnett said, adding that their construction had not harmed local shellfish.

But Mahoney questioned the need to run separate export cables from adjoining wind farms being built by the same developer.

“The developer said they couldn’t because the turbines are producing DC for the South Fork and AC for Sunrise,” Mahoney said. “Wouldn’t it be OK to go back to Ørsted and Eversource and say, ‘Put AC turbines up there instead of DC and just run the one cable and have less environmental impact to our ocean bottom and our sea creatures and mammals?’”

Joe Martens, director of the New York Offshore Wind Alliance, said that although relatively modest in size compared to other projects in BOEM’s queue, the South Fork project is important because electricity demand on the South Fork is growing faster than anywhere else on Long Island.

Adrienne Esposito, executive director of Citizens Campaign for the Environment, a statewide group with 140,000 members, agreed with Martens.

“Although this wind farm won’t cause a fossil fuel plant to close, it prevents another one from being built,” Esposito said.