By David Wojick
Last month I analyzed various holes in the draft federal California Programmatic EIS (PEIS) for offshore wind. See.
Now a new report shows that these seemingly big holes are tiny compared to the yawning Programmatic EIS gap created by the Federal Action Plan for West Coast offshore wind development.
To begin with the full California Program is huge compared to the measly five leases covered by the so-called California PEIS. The document I wrote about would be better called the Starter Kit EIS. Plus there is a lot of development off of Oregon and Washington.
I earlier pointed out that the PEIS document did not address the cumulative impact of those five leases; it just looked at the generic impact of one lease. But what is really Missing In Action is an environmental impact assessment for the entire West Coast Program.
The new report bears the long title: “AN ACTION PLAN FOR Offshore Wind Transmission Development in the U.S. West Coast Region” (all caps in the original).
The Action Plan is a conceptual design for transmission of offshore generation but in order to do that design you have to know where the generation is so that is included in considerable detail.
Instead of the just five leases considered in the present draft EIS the Action Plan includes about one hundred leases by 2035. These typically occur in clusters of from 5 to 20 leases. Moreover while the total generating capacity for 2035 is 15,000 MW this grows to 33,000 MW in 2050.
Each lease contains numerous huge floating turbines each anchored to the sea floor thousands of feet below with multiple mooring lines. So the environmental impact of each cluster is potentially enormous.
Even worse a series of these clusters basically line the coast especially in Northern California and Southern Oregon. Migrating species might encounter and be adversely affected by this entire series.
The list of endangered or protected species that are threatened is quite long. As I pointed out in my prior article these massive 3D cable arrays are a new form of harassment under the Marine Mammal Protection Act. There are also endangered sea turtles, giant rays, etc., in jeopardy.
The PEIS says a single turbine floater can require up to 12 mooring lines to keep it stable and in place in heavy weather. Assuming 15 MW turbines with a dozen lines each the 15,000 MW development would have 12,000 mooring lines. The 33,000 MW case would have a staggering 26,400 mooring lines, many over 4,000 feet long.
We are talking about thousands of square miles of deep ocean literally filled with webs of cables. Harassment is defined by the Marine Mammal Protection Act as causing behavioral change on a protected animal’s part and these monstrous webs will certainly do that. This very large scale continuous harassment should be carefully assessed.
The PEIS also briefly mentions the threat of “secondary entanglement” in the nets, lines and other debris that are caught on these cables over time. The potential adverse effects of this deadly accumulation needs to be assessed in detail before any offshore projects are approved.
The clear solution to these mooring line threats is to severely constrain the number of harassment authorizations. With these very limited authorizations very few new offshore wind projects can be built. Nor should they be since they are environmentally destructive. Each project requires a large number of authorizations so drastically reducing their number drastically reduces the number of offshore wind projects.
The simplest way to do this is to cap the total number of wind authorizations that will be issued throughout the Program for a given exposed population. This is analogous to capping the emission of dangerous pollutants. One could even have a cap and trade program where developers bid for authorizations just as they now bid for leases. The 1990 cap and trade program for power plant sulfur dioxide emissions is an obvious analog.
If the cumulative harassment were limited to say 10% of the exposed population of each threatened species this would severely constrain offshore wind development.
In summary the so-called California Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement is nothing of the kind. The full Offshore Wind Program needs to be assessed for the entire West Coast before any project is approved for construction. This required assessment is Missing in Action.
Based on this assessment the cumulative impacts then have to be minimized. Capping the authorized harassment of each threatened species may be the best way to avoid destructive impacts.
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Basically the whole Pacific coast is in the Gray Whale migration path. I remember being on Bonny Doon beach, and a Gray Whale came within fifty to a hundred yards of shore. That is just north of Santa Cruz. Plus, there are a fair number of other whale species off the coast.
Save The Whales went away when the Green Blob got obsessed with Renewable Energy.
Good point about Gray Whales!
The original Save the Whales is opposed to offshore wind as are others:
https://www.cfact.org/2022/12/21/ten-whale-groups-slam-atlantic-osw/
It is the big green guns that have gone industrial.
Industry with government backing is fascism, but the libs and greenies can’t see it.
“Whales? Whales? We don’t need no stinkin’ whales!”
Said by every offshore wind developer.
While I agree with the premise of the article, I have to disagree on strategy. Using endangered species to limit wind development is the same strategy that resulted in California saving the snail darter (or some such tiny creature) at the expense of having water to fight fires, and saving field mice at the expense of letting fire breaks get overgrown and useless. If the species are in fact endangered by the windmills, by all means. But when you start theorizing that limiting harassment to 10% of exposed population of each species as a way to limit wind farms, you’ve lost the argument before it started. The alarmists and their supporters couldn’t care less about the environment, if they need to destroy it in order to save the planet, they are OK with that. The see no contradiction.
The reason windfarms should not be built is that they are not just uneconomical and unreliable, there are alternatives like nuclear power that take a fraction of the space, produce electricity that is stable, are a fraction of the price. THAT’S the reason to not build wind farms.
Although I would like to propose that if wind farms are going to be built, any whales that are harassed be put to a humane death to end their suffering and their blubber be used to produce oil to displace fossil fuels. The definition of harassed could be extended to include all whales in the Pacific. Oh and dolphins. In fact put a bounty on them, the sooner they are extinct the sooner the windmills can save the environment. Just to watch their heads explode, they are too far gone to understand sarcasm.
I agree the harassment capping strategy has risks but I am looking for a legally defensible way to constrain OSW that can be done now under the Offshore Wind EO and existing laws. This is the best i can find but I am open to alternatives.
It would be wonderful if Trump could simply switch CA’s target of 25,000 MW of OSW to nuclear (plus coal and gas) but there is no way to do that. Generation is a State responsibility subject to Federal environmental rules.
Floating wind turbines are also in the first stage of development, the only ones installed are off the coast of Scotland. First-of-a-kind technology carries risk.
I’m 70, and vividly recall the total war waged by the environmental movement against offshore oil drilling on the California coast. The biggest objection, believe it or not, was that the presence of oil platforms would spoil the view. It worked because even non-coastal dwellers – even non-Californians – could visualize it. Data that I have found (https://oceaneconomics.org/oil_gas/oil_gas.html) show that the production off of the California coast peaked in 1986, at 32.5 million barrels. That’s equivalent to 55,250 GW-hr of electrical energy production, the amount generated by 6 1 GW power plants working at full capacity 24/7/365 . How many 15 MW wind turbines (I know of none, btw), would be required to deliver that amount of energy at any realistically achievable capacity factor? How would that compare with a handful of oil platforms?
But, all that math is too white supremacist and doesn’t consider the Indigenous knowledge to counter colonialism!
Humor – a difficult concept.
— Lt. Saavik
Humor aside, which indigenous people are in California? Illegal aliens, perhaps?
Sometime along when that happened I was working in Louisiana and received an inquiry about removal of platforms. Concern was disorientation of fishes. Another came from the east coast about disorientation of bird migration due to platform lights. Don’t recall exactly what I replied but in both cases wasn’t with the currently developed crisis narrative. Oil did leak but difficult to know offshore whether it was natural or not. Galveston Bay was written off since oysters did have a taste problem but handled it better than humans. Gulf platforms are now environmentally valuable but for reasons nothing like a turbine.
Sonnier, Farley, Joyce Teerling and H. Dickson Hoese. 1976. Observations on the Offshore Reef and Platform Fish Fauna of Louisiana. Copeia. (1):105-111.
https://doi.org/10.2307/1443779
Sonnier was a pioneer underwater photographer unfortunately dying at an early age. Sonnier Bank is named after him. One of the first (1963) on the now famous Flower Gardens and other reefs on which his diving buddies had their own now forgotten names. https://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2002/0411/wg-sonn.html