Tag: BOEM

CFACT Comments on the California Offshore Wind Draft Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS)

BOEM is taking comments on a draft Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) for its five floating wind offshore leases off the California coast. This is BOEM’s second offshore wind PEIS. The first was for a set of leases off New York which featured fixed bottom turbines. This is the first PEIS for floating wind turbines which are very different from the fixed turbines being built along the Atlantic coast.

From CFACT

CFACT Comments on the California Offshore Wind Draft Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS)

By Craig Rucker, President

CFACT

https://www.cfact.org

Submitted to https://www.regulations.gov/document/BOEM-2023-0061-0189

February 12, 2025

Overview of our concerns

BOEM is taking comments on a draft Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) for its five floating wind offshore leases off the California coast. This is BOEM’s second offshore wind PEIS. The first was for a set of leases off New York which featured fixed bottom turbines. This is the first PEIS for floating wind turbines which are very different from the fixed turbines being built along the Atlantic coast.

Floating wind is still an immature technology with a large number of proposed designs none of which has been tested at commercial utility scale. There are just a handful of small demonstration scale projects in the world.

There are at least two useful things about this PEIS. First is a pretty good tutorial on floating wind with a focus on the California case. This is Appendix A, done by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. They rule out a number of design options including the most popular that has been demonstrated, the spar floater. The huge range of options they present shows the immaturity of the technology

Second the PEIS includes an encyclopedic discussion of numerous potential adverse impacts of a generic floating wind project. These impacts are limited to just what is contemplated for each of the five leases so when combined for all five leases it is clear that this Program will be environmentally destructive. These adverse impacts cannot be mitigated so the correct decision is that the Program should not proceed. The No Action Alternative is the proper choice.

Here is just a short list of some of the major flaws in the PEIS

1. By far the biggest flaw is that there is no cumulative multi-lease impact assessment. The whole point of a PEIS is to do such an assessment for the entire Program. Cumulative impact can be much greater than the sum of individual project impacts especially where two or more projects are closely clustered as in this case. Thus merely listing individual project impacts is completely inadequate.

2. In many cases an adverse impact is merely mentioned with no assessment of the potential harm. This is supposed to be an impact assessment not just a list of impacts.

3. The systematic harassment of large numbers of endangered and protected species of whales and other animals is certain to occur but it is not discussed. In fact the term “harassment” only occurs twice in the entire main report. Death due to noise harassment causing deadly behavior is one of the top adverse impacts of offshore wind.

4. Moreover floating wind introduces a major non-acoustic form of harassment. This is the 3D web of potentially thousands of mooring cables each of which could be on the order of a mile long. We are talking about hundreds 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.

5. The PEIS does briefly mention the threat of “secondary entanglement” in the nets, lines and other debris that are caught on the cables over time. The potential adverse effects of this deadly accumulation needs to be assessed in detail.

6. Lastly there is an extensive economics section but no mention of cost. Development of these five leases will likely cost ratepayers and taxpayers tens of billions of dollars, possibly hundreds of billions. The entire Program should cost over a trillion dollars but these staggering sums are never quantified. Job creation is treated in detail as a benefit when jobs are in fact a cost. The total cost needs to be estimated.

It is clear that this PEIS is woefully inadequate. In fact it specifically avoids those issues that justify cancelling the Program. The cumulative impact threat is treated in more detail below.

The entire Western Offshore Wind Energy Program must be assessed

A new federal report shows that these five leases 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 present PEIS document would be better called the Starter Kit EIS. Plus there is a lot of development off of Oregon and Washington.

As pointed out above the PEIS document does not address the cumulative impact of those five leases; it just looks 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 PEIS 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 a massive 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 pointed out above 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 Appendix A 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 describes 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. Note that this threat accumulates over time, throughout the entire life cycle of a project.

Capping harassment diminishes the adverse impact of this offshore wind development

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.

Respectfully submitted,

Craig Rucker

President

CFACT

Washington, D.C.

CFACT blasts Fed’s “floating wind” fantasy

From  CFACT

CFACT President Craig Rucker has blown the whistle on Federal plans to put hundreds of floating wind generators off the Oregon coast. Floating wind is the latest green energy fantasy, taking its place along with hydrogen, EVs, battery storage, and net zero.

The idea is that where the water is too deep for conventional offshore wind generators, we will simply put these huge towers and turbines on floats. Pretty much all of the West Coast fits this bill, as does most of Maine.

Responding to a Federal request for comments on a big floating wind proposal for Oregon, Rucker explains clearly that the technology needed to do this does not exist and may never exist in an economically feasible form. The federal agency is the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM). The plan is to designate hundreds of thousands of ocean acres as Wind Energy Areas and then start auctioning them off to floating wind developers.

His succinct comments are here: http://www.cfact.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Comments-concerning-BOEMs-Draft-Wind-Energy-Areas.pdf

I want to dive into the technology a bit to show what a boondoggle floating wind really is.

First, let me say that, sure, we can put huge turbine towers on floats. Our fighter jets take off from and land on floats, right, floats called aircraft carriers. But they are really big, hence expensive. The same is true for floating wind, albeit at a somewhat smaller scale.

Look at it this way. Suppose you took a sailboat and put a 600′ tall mast on it. At the top, you put an 800-ton turbine with three 500′ long wind-catching blades. How big would that boat have to be not to blow over when hit by severe wind and waves?

The answer is very big indeed, in fact, huge. Now compare this huge float with the simple monopile that conventional offshore generators sit on. The monopile is a simple steel tube, maybe 30′ in diameter and a few hundred feet long, driven solidly into the ocean floor.

Compared to the huge float, the monopile is small and cheap. But simple monopile base offshore wind facilities are already tremendously expensive. Floating wind is projected to cost much more, from 2.5 to 3 times more, in fact.

In addition to the huge float holding up the turbine tower, there have to be a bunch of monster mooring chains anchored firmly to the ocean floor in all directions to keep the float from rocking too much in heavy seas or from capsizing. Then, too, the power lines taking off the electricity have to somehow get from these bobbing floats to the distant shore.

The highly specialized fabrication facilities and work boats required to make and install all this stuff in deep water do not exist. Given that over 50 vastly different floating wind designs have been proposed, we do not even know what to build.

I say projected because no utility-scale floating wind facility exists in the world today. BOEM is talking about quickly building thousands of Mega Watt (MW) of floating wind. Five leases pegged at 3,600 MW have already been sold off California. But as Rucker points out, the biggest facility in the world today is an experimental 88 MW and that just fired up a few months ago.

Those five California leases are, in effect, experimental. The developers are each going to try to produce an economically viable floating wind facility. As things stand, the odds are very long against them. I can hardly wait to see the Construction and Operations Plans, which are the first required step in the long road toward project approval.

But the ultimate crunch point is selling the juice via a Power Purchase Agreement (PPA). If costs run three times regular offshore wind, which is already extremely expensive, then the required PPAs might simply be unobtainable.

However, California just passed a law allowing the State to directly buy offshore wind energy. Perhaps the plan is for the State to buy horrendously expensive electricity, sell it to the utilities at the much lower going wholesale rate, then let the taxpayers eat the losses. It is, after all, Crazy California.

Mind you, this silly game is being played around the world. Several countries have launched similarly speculative large-scale floating wind projects, and many more are talking about it. Of course, they are also talking about mass-scale hydrogen, EVs, and net zero. It is all part of the same green nonsense.

As for the American floating wind fantasy, stay tuned to CFACT as this engineering comedy unfolds.

BOEM’S Right Whale coverup and deception

BOEM pretends it knows the noise impairment levels for Right Whales but hides its own admitted lack of knowledge on the issue and also obscures its ongoing research that will not be completed for several years.

From CFACT

By Collister Johnson

BOEM pretends it knows the noise impairment levels for Right Whales but hides its own admitted lack of knowledge on the issue and also obscures its ongoing research that will not be completed for several years.

The Biden Administration is rushing headlong to start the massive construction of offshore wind power projects off the East Coast. The wind industry calls these installations “farms”.

In no way, shape, or form do they resemble bucolic farms?

They are massive, noisy, complicated, metal, concrete, and fiberglass factories consisting of thousands of steel towers, all taller than the Washington Monument, topped by fiberglass blades longer than a football field, and surrounded by tons of rock required to prevent ocean scouring.

Even if one subscribes to the absurd theory that carbon dioxide controls the climate, these factories will, when considering the energy and materials required to construct them, result in zero reduction of CO2 in the atmosphere and have zero impact on world climate.

Repeat: zero reduction of CO2 in the atmosphere and zero impact on climate.

But vendors believe there could be a lot of money to be made in this business, and the wind industry has been effective in sprinkling seed money into the coffers of politicians and so-called environmental groups to support the legislation necessary to pay for this boondoggle – money which will ultimately be derived from hapless electricity consumers who want nothing more than cheap, reliable electricity to power their daily lives, and who will find out too late in the game that offshore wind will be neither cheap, reliable, or environmentally friendly.

Fortunately, several citizen groups have been formed that are vigorously opposing this massive industrialization of the ocean. The two leading organizations are Save Right Whales Coalition, led by Lisa Linowes: https://saverightwhales.org/, and Save Long Beach Island, led by Dr. Robert Stern https://www.savelbi.org. In addition, Michael Shellenberger has produced a terrific documentary, Thrown to the Wind, which provides an eye-opening view into the real world of noise produced by so-called survey ships. Save LBI has also initiated litigation in New Jersey federal court seeking to revoke the permits issued by BOEM authorizing this preconstruction activity.

Officially listed as an endangered species by all State and federal governments, the Right Whale falls under the protection of both the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Endangered Species Act. These statutes require wind energy companies to obtain an “incidental take” permit for the Right Whales and other protected marine mammals while engaged in pre-construction site assessment work, which consists of sonar blasting the ocean floor to determine the placement of the wind turbines.

Last year, BOEM issued a dozen “take” permits to different wind developers who spent the winter months sonar blasting off the East Coast.

Between December 2022 and May of this year, 60 large whales, including one Right Whale, washed up dead on the beaches of NY, NJ, and VA. BOEM put together a “hastily called ” news conference to counter the outcry from the public over this outbreak of dead whales.

BOEM seemed absolutely sure there was no connection between the dead whales and sonar blasting: “At this point, there is no scientific evidence”, BOEM claimed in carefully worded lawyer jargon, ” that noise resulting from offshore wind site characterization surveys could potentially cause mortality of whales”. It concluded, ” There are no known links between recent large whale mortalities and ongoing offshore wind surveys”.

But what BOEM did not mention, or even reference, was the fact that it has funded a program currently underway that is designed precisely to answer the question of the extent to which sonar noise adversely impacts Baleen whales. Nor did BOEM mention that it had virtually no knowledge of the impact of sonar noise on large whales when it authorized the IHAs that permitted sonar mapping off the East Coast.

The program, termed “Auditory Weighting Function for Low Frequency Whales,” consists of three studies that examine the underwater noise abilities of the minke and humpback whales as proxies for Right Whales and other Baleen whales.

The program, begun in 2021, contains some startling admissions. First, BOEM is very clear in admitting that it does not know how sonar noise impacts “low frequency” whales. “The hearing abilities of ‘low frequency’ whales”, it explained, “remain one of the ‘major unknowns’ as the regulatory community has tried to deal with the effects of noise on marine mammals.” It added, “This information is imperative for BOEM to assess the potential effects of noise-producing actions (from both oil and gas and renewable energy) on these species, many of which are highly threatened”. It further conceded, ” the data need is national information on just one species of baleen whale which will significantly advance the current understanding (which is almost nonexistent) ……”.

Second, it acknowledged that “we are required to know this information for analyses under the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Endangered Species Act.” It further explains that ” the lack of meaningful, validated data for LF whales has made it extremely challenging for NMFS and others to derive meaningful regulatory ‘not to exceed thresholds’ for noise sources, as required under the MMPA and ESA”.

The program envisions a set of three studies funded not just by BOEM but also by the US Navy, NOAA, and the Marine Mammal Commission.

This means that the program, when completed, will provide guidance for the entire government concerning acceptable noise levels for both oil and gas and offshore wind development.

So why hasn’t BOEM acknowledged that it does not know noise impairment levels for large whales, and why hasn’t it revealed the existence of this program, which will produce the information it is “required to know” under the MMPA and ESA?

The reason is obvious. The studies are being conducted right now and have not yet been completed. The final report and conclusions of the studies are not scheduled for completion until June 2025, almost two years from now.

BOEM is obviously hiding the existence of these critical studies. BOEM does not yet know the impact of sonar signals on Baleen whales, it is very clear that under the Marine Mammal Protection Act BOEM is required to rely on ” the best scientific information available” in crafting underwater noise regulations. In its rush to authorize offshore wind construction before the elections in November 2024, BOEM is relying on guesswork and outdated guesswork, at that. The Federal Code of Regulations makes it very clear that BOEM cannot hide behind the excuse that this critical information is not available when it knows full well that the data will be derived from ongoing studies that are organized and funded by BOEM itself.

At a minimum, this set of facts would support a temporary injunction prohibiting BOEM from issuing further IHAs until the studies have been completed and the data has been incorporated into definitive regulations. Any final Environmental Impact Statement issued by the EPA that fails to incorporate the data to be derived from these latest studies will be de facto misleading and de jure unlawful.

When BOEM claims that “there is no evidence” linking the recent outbreak of whale deaths due to sonar testing, it is engaging in obvious and easily provable deception. This is a classic case of gaslighting. BOEM cannot sweep its “knowledge gap” concerning Right Whale noise impairment under the rug and expect the courts to approve any further offshore wind development.

Author


Collister Johnson

Johnson has spent the last four decades working in the public and private sectors in Virginia, primarily in the fields of project finance and maritime transportation.

He began his career in public service as Chairman of the Board of the Virginia Port Authority. He was appointed by President George W. Bush, and confirmed by the Senate, as a member of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, and most recently, as Administrator of the St. Lawrence Seaway Development Corporation.

In that capacity, he became knowledgeable in the field of climate and its impact on the Great Lakes. He currently serves on CFACT’s Board of Advisors.

Johnson holds a B.A. degree from Yale University, and a J.D. from the University of Virginia.

Feds admit offshore wind can kill whales!

Despite public proclamations of innocence, it turns out BOEM and NOAA clearly acknowledge the deadly threat of offshore wind development to marine mammals. Not surprisingly they do it in documents that are subject to judicial review, lest they be caught fibbing.

From CFACT

By David Wojick 

Despite public proclamations of innocence, it turns out BOEM and NOAA clearly acknowledge the deadly threat of offshore wind development to marine mammals. Not surprisingly they do it in documents that are subject to judicial review, lest they be caught fibbing.

Of course these admissions are well hidden, buried in the depths of thousand page documents, but they are there to be found. These are the Draft Environmental Impact Statements (DEIS) that precede each offshore wind project. They are jointly prepared by BOEM and NOAA.

The key is that the overall project EIS includes the EIS for NOAA’s harassment authorizations for the construction of that project. In fact you can find this language by searching the DEIS for the word “harassment”. I am told that this is standard language which varies little from project to project.

The standard language says just what we have been saying! Harassment is likely to lead to dangerous behavior, including increased likelihood of deadly ship strikes and entanglements. It also says, as we have, that having multiple projects increases these risks.

Here is a good example of admitting that harassment is can cause harm. I could not have said it better.

“It is possible that pile driving could displace animals into areas with lower habitat quality or higher risk of vessel collision or fisheries interaction. Multiple construction activities within the same calendar year could potentially affect migration, foraging, calving, and individual fitness. The magnitude of impacts would depend upon the locations, duration, and timing of concurrent construction. Such impacts could be long term, of high intensity, and of high exposure level. Generally, the more frequently an individual’s normal behaviors are disrupted or the longer the duration of the disruption, the greater the potential for biologically significant consequences to individual fitness. The potential for biologically significant effects is expected to increase with the number of pile-driving events to which an individual is exposed.”

Empire Wind DEIS v.1, Page 3.15-14, PDF page 372

Empire_Wind_DEIS_Vol1Herunterladen

This warning is about risks created by pile driving but all forms of acoustic harassment fit this description. NOAA harassment authorizations are based on the estimated number of critters that will be exposed to unsafe sound levels. The source of the dangerous sounds is irrelevant. What matters most is the volume. Sound is a pressure wave; the louder the sound the greater the physical pressure on the hearing system. Pain and physical damage are possible.

In fact the infamous sonar surveying sounds, implicated in the whale deaths to date, can be much louder that the incredibly loud pile driving. Driving the enormous piles for the proposed wind projects is estimated to create sounds around 190 decibels, which is painfully loud in humans.

But some sonar equipment deliberately emits sounds over 200 decibels. Decibels is a log scale so this is not just 5% greater than 190; it is much greater.

Thus it makes no sense that NOAA claims sonar surveys have no significant impact and so do not fall under NEPA, while pile driving does. This is especially true when, as just happened, a dozen different projects are given simultaneous authorization to acoustically harass large numbers of whales.

What is important is that NOAA and a BOEM are clearly stating that the acoustic threats we have been warning about and suspecting are real. The telling correlations between sonar blasting and increased whale deaths cannot be waived away.

Correlation is not causation, but correlation between cause and predicted effect is very strong evidence that the cause is effective. NOAA and BOEM’s repeated insistence that there is no evidence offshore wind development is killing whales is clearly contradicted by their own Environmental Impact Statements.

Harassment kills.

Author