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Bureau of Ocean Energy Management

    ENVIRONMENT

    Against the Wind: Questions About BOEM’s Fisheries Analysis

    Maine-based anti-wind advocate Jerry Leeman leads a forum at the Truro library

    By

    TRURO — The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) announced the final sale notice for the Gulf of Maine offshore wind project lease areas on Sept. 16. The agency shrunk the overall area by 120,000 acres, removing significant portions of the two northern leases off the coast of Maine, carving a transit lane between the two farthest-offshore southern areas, and shaving small portions off other southern areas.

    In an email to the Independent, BOEM spokeswoman Alison Ferris said her agency made the changes to avoid North Atlantic right whale areas, establish a barrier around Jeffrey’s Bank Habitat Management Area off Maine, and respond to feedback from at least three different fisheries working groups.

    This decision did little to satisfy Jerry Leeman, a Harpswell, Maine-based former commercial fisherman and founder of the New England Fishermen’s Stewardship Association (NEFSA), an organization that opposes the Gulf of Maine offshore wind area.

    NEFSA “remains steadfast in its opposition,” wrote Leeman in a press release, “despite the shrinking of the original areas.”

    Four days earlier, on Sept. 12, Leeman gave a talk he called a “wind energy informational” at the Truro Public Library. Leeman drew on his own experience and described what he sees as BOEM’s lack of good baseline data for the offshore wind project.

    “From a sea captain’s perspective, if you don’t know where you are, then surely you don’t know where you’re going,” Leeman told his audience.

    BOEM’s work so far concerns only the impact of identifying possible areas for leasing. The final environmental assessment (EA) for each lease, which it will use to evaluate potential environmental impacts and suggest mitigation measures, will not be completed until leases are auctioned. A lease will not permit construction but will allow only the right to submit project plans.

    BOEM solicited comments from the public on the draft EA in June and July and input from the Outer Cape community specifically in a forum held on July 17 in Eastham.

    Elena Rice, who has operated Reel Deal Fishing Charters in Truro with her husband, Bobby, for 25 years, spoke at the Eastham forum, but she says BOEM didn’t hear her. “We went to that meeting,” Rice said. “We said our piece. It had no effect on the final EA.”

    Truro Select Board clerk Nancy Medoff, who was at the BOEM forum, contacted Rice afterwards, because, Medoff said, she thought it was important to support fishermen who are concerned about the potential risks of wind energy projects.

    Medoff wouldn’t say what she thinks about the proposed offshore wind project or about Leeman’s advocacy against it. She said she had heard Leeman speak at BOEM’s forum and was “interested in what he was saying.”

    “I think BOEM needs to either address the questions that have been asked in a very clear, succinct, and easy to find manner or hold more forums on the Outer Cape,” said Medoff.

    Truro marketing coordinator Katie Riconda also reached out to Rice after BOEM’s Eastham forum. Riconda told the Independent that Rice offered to help organize a local event, and it was Rice who invited Leeman to be the speaker for the session.

    Riconda added that the event was not organized by the town of Truro or the Truro Select Board, and that neither has an official policy position on wind energy development.

    Rice said that she is particularly concerned about the populations of striped bass and bluefin tuna that sustain her small business and her family. She included this in her comment to BOEM, which did not consider recreational bluefin tuna data in the draft EA.

    Rice criticized BOEM at its forum for using data on highly migratory species like bluefin tuna without using latitude and longitude, and BOEM renewable energy program specialist Zachary Jylkka conceded this was “a known issue.”

    “This is the sentiment in the fishing community: a complete distrust of the system and the fact that our voices are completely ignored,” Rice said.

    “There’s a huge rift between the scientific community and the fishermen,” said another audience member. “They won’t listen to what we try to tell them.”

    At his talk at the library, Leeman said many outstanding questions remain on the potential impact of the project on the fisheries.

    For example, Leeman pointed out that vessel trip report data, which BOEM uses to determine the value of fishing areas, includes only an average depth for the trip and which broad “chart area” fishing was performed in, so the specifics of where fish are caught is not captured in mapping efforts.

    In BOEM and NOAA’s siting analysis report, commercial fishing data are only part of the information used to determine suitability. The agency also uses large boat vessel monitoring system data, Northeast Fisheries Science Center trawl data, seafloor mapping of vulnerable habitat, data on right whales, and recommendations from the wind industry for deciding where to locate turbines.

    Some of Leeman’s criticisms of wind projects took up issues scientists have also raised. For example, he described substations that heat seawater to keep themselves cool and trenchers to bury undersea cables as possible problems. “We know we’re changing the ocean, but to what extent, we have no idea,” he said. Many scientists agree there are still unknowns to be studied, especially when it comes to floating turbines.

    Operational turbines, Leeman said during his talk, can interfere with ship radar, which could make navigating in inclement weather particularly dangerous. The National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine stressed similar findings in a 2022 report.

    Some of Leeman’s points, however, contained inaccuracies.

    He argued that electromagnetic fields from undersea cables would cause mutations in lobsters, but as reported previously by the Independent, this claim is based on a study using electromagnetic fields that were 10 to 100 times stronger than the kind found around turbine cables.

    Leeman’s remarks on the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution experiment involving releasing sodium hydroxide into the Gulf of Maine are not supported by the institution’s preliminary results. While those show the experiment would not harm plankton populations, Leeman claimed it would kill so much wildlife as to render an environmental assessment invalid.

    The U.S. Dept. of the Interior set an Oct. 29, 2024 auction date for the eight offshore wind energy leases in the Gulf of Maine.

    Editor’s note: Because of a reporting error, an earlier version of this article, published in print on Sept. 19, incorrectly identified Brendan Adams as a fisherman who commented on the wind power controversy. Adams was not present at the Truro forum.

    ELECTROMAGNETIC

    Studies Look at Turbine Cables and Lobsters

    Experiments in Long Island Sound found few effects

    By

    WELLFLEET — Two years after its first public announcement in August 2022, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) plans to hold public auctions for eight offshore wind energy leasing areas in the Gulf of Maine this October.

    During the public comment period ahead of the auction, BOEM received more than 100 comments, many of which mentioned the potential effects of floating wind turbines on the marine environment, seafood stocks, and commercial fishermen’s livelihoods.

    One concern is the large power cables that will transfer electricity from the offshore wind turbines to the mainland. The power flowing through these cables generates electromagnetic fields, or EMFs, that some worry could disrupt the movement of lobsters across the seafloor or even affect their reproductive health.

    Scientists who spoke with the Independent said that EMFs from offshore wind farms are not a cause for panic but do merit further investigation.

    “Things aren’t just going to turn upside-down dead,” said Andrew Gill, a lead scientist at the U.K.-based Centre for Environment, Fisheries, and Aquaculture Science who has published research on the effects of undersea power cables on lobsters.

    It’s important to address the concerns of fishermen with further studies, Gill added. “We need to identify what the concerns are and have the appropriately designed studies to help address them.”

    What Are EMFs?

    Electromagnetic fields are invisible areas of energy that have both electric and magnetic properties. The spinning of the Earth’s iron core generates an EMF that is much larger than the planet itself, while the movement of electrons through a copper wire, or a magnet through a copper coil, also generate EMFs around them.

    While humans cannot directly sense EMFs, many other organisms can — including hammerhead sharks, which hunt by following the electric fields generated by their prey species, and homing pigeons, which use the Earth’s magnetic field to navigate.

    Lobsters appear also to sense electromagnetic fields. A 2003 study by two biologists from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, found that spiny lobsters will travel toward a coil that replicates the magnetic field near their home territories, suggesting they use magnetic fields to navigate like homing pigeons do. Research like this has led some to argue that the EMFs from turbine cables, which carry enormous amounts of electricity, will disrupt lobsters’ movements or prevent their migration altogether.

    Beth Casoni, executive director of the Mass. Lobstermen’s Association, said that lobster fishermen are “absolutely” concerned about how EMFs will affect lobsters.

    “I’m really afraid that the electrical current is going to disturb lobsters from coming into the bay,” said Mike Rego, a Provincetown-based lobster fisherman. “Every fisherman I talk to feels the same way.”

    Rego said he had asked BOEM officials at a meeting this summer about the effects of EMFs from undersea cables and “they had no answer.”

    Josiah Mayo, another Provincetown-based lobster fisherman, said that many fishermen he knows distrust experts, and he believes they have some fair cause.

    “We’ve been led astray and misinformed by experts over and over again,” Mayo said, noting in particular the loose regulation of groundfishing in the 1970s that was supported by experts at the time. “That crashed the entire groundfishery in New England,” Mayo said.

    Nonetheless, Mayo said, “There’s no data I’ve seen that shows there’s a big deal” when it comes to lobsters and undersea cables. He noted that there are already large cables in other places, including those that connect Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard to Cape Cod, and they haven’t seemed to reduce lobster numbers.

    Mayo added that the research he has seen to date indicates that climate change and bycatch from trawlers are the most pressing threats to the lobster fishery.

    EMFs and Migration

    The most prominent study so far to address the effect of EMFs on lobster migration was published in 2018 and led by University of Rhode Island oceanographer Zoë Hutchison. The study placed one group of lobsters in an enclosure directly next to the Cross-Sound Cable, a massive undersea cable between Long Island and Connecticut, and another set of lobsters in an enclosure far from it. It then measured the lobsters’ movements to see whether they might avoid the cable.

    The researchers found that there were slight changes in the lobsters’ behavior, but they were extremely subtle and did not suggest that the electromagnetic field from the cable was a barrier to lobster migration. “There was a response by lobsters, but it was not extreme,” said Gill, who was an author on that study.

    “At that level of cable, and that level of power, and the context of the organisms there, is it a barrier? No,” said Gill.

    Nonetheless, Gill stressed that research on the Cross-Sound Cable does not necessarily apply to all cables. “It has been extended as ‘there’s never going to be a barrier,’ ” said Gill. “That’s not true, because cables are getting bigger.”

    Another concern, Gill said, would be the number of cables necessary for an offshore wind project, as this would lead to a greater likelihood of lobsters encountering EMFs. The effects of a network of undersea cables on lobsters remain poorly understood, he said.

    Several organizations are now conducting lobster surveys around future turbine sites in New England, including a UMass Dartmouth-led study south of Martha’s Vineyard, a Commercial Fisheries Research Foundation-led study south of Rhode Island, and a Rhode Island Dept. of Environmental Management-led study in Narragansett Bay.

    These surveys will count lobsters before, during, and after the installation of wind turbines using “ventless” traps that capture lobsters of all ages.

    According to Corinne Truesdale, a marine biologist at the Rhode Island Dept. of Environmental Management, her department’s survey will continue for seven years, monitoring not just lobster numbers but also the age and sex of the population, the condition of their shells, and how many eggs females carry.

    Truesdale said that among the fishermen who helped design that study the potential for migration barriers was a major concern. As a result, some lobsters will get unique tags and then be released in hopes they might be recaptured elsewhere.

    Truesdale said that fishermen had also helped select the survey sites and the type of traps used. “They were a big part of designing the survey,” she said. “They’re a good way to check the methods that you might come up with as scientists.”

    Truesdale’s study is set to conclude in 2031 — around the time actual construction in the Gulf of Maine turbine leasing areas is expected to begin.

    EMFs and Mutations

    Another study regarding lobsters and EMFs, led by Petra Harsanyi of the St. Abbs Marine Biology Station in Scotland, found that high-intensity fields can cause mutations in developing crustaceans and impair their ability to swim. This study, however, used EMFs that were 10 times stronger than what would be expected around a power cable for an offshore wind farm, and Harsanyi told the Independent that lobsters in the wild would be very unlikely to encounter anything as strong as the fields in her experiment.

    Harsanyi’s study put egg-laying lobsters in a tank with high-intensity EMF cables running around it and monitored the young lobsters’ development. She found that the lobsters in the EMF tank laid fewer eggs than those in the control tank, and when those eggs hatched, the young had more birth defects and were more likely to fail swimming tests.

    Harsanyi also said that, in nature, larval lobsters float in the upper levels of the water column, much like plankton. In the experiment, the larval lobsters were kept constantly close to the source of the electromagnetic fields.

    This can seem like a technicality, but Gill said the danger of EMFs is closely related to their strength.

    “If I put a speaker next to your ear and turned it up enough, your ears are going to bleed,” Gill said, but this doesn’t mean that sounds at lower volumes are similarly damaging.

    Nonetheless, Harsanyi thinks a connection between EMFs and mutations warrants further scrutiny. Her research team is now running another experiment using EMFs that are more like those around undersea power cables.

    For now, Harsanyi said, “Would I stop building wind farms based on our research? I don’t think so.

    “We are not against wind farms here,” Harsanyi added. “We’re going to have to move into green energy, but hopefully we can do it in an environmentally responsible way.”

    WIND ENERGY

    BOEM Hears Mostly Opposition at a Meeting in Eastham

    Local worries focus on possible effects of offshore turbines and cables on fishing

    By

    EASTHAM — Local officials on the Outer Cape have for a month been calling for the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) to hold a public information session here about one of eight proposed wind energy areas in the Gulf of Maine — the one sited about 20 miles off Cape Cod’s back shore — before its size and shape are approved.

    Approximately 200 people came to the Four Points by Sheraton for a meeting with BOEM on the Gulf of Maine wind energy area proposed off the outer shores of Cape Cod. (Photo by William von Herff)

    BOEM, the agency of the Dept. of Interior that is charged with managing the development of offshore wind, finally did that on June 17, and some 200 people turned out at the Four Points by Sheraton for it.

    BOEM announced the meeting only six days before it was held. The agency’s renewable energy program specialist Zachary Jylkka said that it was spurred by requests from local officials here and that, despite the planned public comment period being over, BOEM would take comments from the meeting into account.

    The Independent spoke to eight people on their way into a packed conference room. Four said they had come to the session because they supported wind development, two said they were against it, and two said they had come to learn more. During the meeting, however, that straw poll did not appear to hold up. Of the 32 people who spoke, 25 opposed the wind energy area proposal or criticized BOEM’s management of it so far, and rounds of applause followed their criticisms. One person speaking in favor of the plan was booed.

    Statements about possible negative effects of the development on commercial fishing dominated the meeting. Many of those who spoke identified themselves as fishermen or the wives of fishermen and said that they feared their livelihoods would be lost because of the construction of wind turbines.

    Jylkka said that in designing the lease areas BOEM had tried to exclude the most productive fishing areas, since fishermen would be “effectively excluded” from those areas once construction begins. But several fishermen said that the vessel transit route data that BOEM used do not portray precisely enough where they fish.

    The data that BOEM used are based on averages of fishermen’s routes, said Jerry Leeman, CEO of the New England Fishermen’s Stewardship Association. “It was never designed for that kind of analysis,” he said. His association opposes offshore wind development.

    Jylkka said that the lack of precise data is “a known issue” for BOEM. He said the agency wants to hear from fishermen who have worked in the proposed lease areas to help refine their plans.

    A few people pointed to research suggesting that the electromagnetic fields emitted by undersea transmission cables would affect the lobster fishery. Truro lobsterman Dana Pazolt said he believes the cables would serve as a barrier to lobster migration. “You run the wires across the seabed, our industry is dead,” he said.

    No study has yet been done on how lobster migration might be affected by undersea cables. A study led by Petra Harsanyi from the St. Abbs Marine Station in Scotland, however, found that lobsters and crabs are worse at swimming and three times more likely to develop visible birth defects when they are exposed to electromagnetic fields during development.

    Another claim was that offshore substations, which are used to facilitate long-distance electricity transmission, might use seawater to cool their machinery and in doing so warm the water and kill the plankton in it.

    The Independent was unable to locate any studies on the large-scale effects of offshore substations on marine ecosystems. Luke Feinberg, an energy program specialist at BOEM, said that the bureau has received “a lot of good questions” about substations but that the agency will not be able to assess their impact until there are specific plans from energy companies.

    Fishermen’s safety while navigating through the wind field was raised as another concern. Eastham groundfisherman Michael Russo described how difficult it can be to navigate in heavy weather with low visibility.

    Feinberg agreed, saying that, despite the five-nautical-mile-wide traffic corridors that BOEM established between the leases, “in heavy weather, these lines don’t really mean a lot.”

    Fishermen and nonfishermen alike said they opposed possible plans to lay transmission cables in Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary. Kathleen Bacon of Wellfleet said, “I want you to stand with me and demand that they stay away from Stellwagen Bank,” which got a loud round of applause. Then Wellfleet Select Board chair John Wolf and Chatham Select Board member Jeffrey Dykens both said they doubted that the project would be possible without laying cable there.

    BOEM does not have authority over leasing there, Jylkka said. That responsibility falls on the sanctuary itself, which is undertaking its own evaluation.

    Some claims made at the meeting were unfounded. Leeman said that offshore wind turbines would drive whale strandings, a myth that is not supported by evidence. And when Eastham fisherman Brendan Adams alleged that Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary was being paid off by wind companies to let a cable run through it, Richard Delaney, who is a member of the sanctuary advisory council as well as director of the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown, refuted his claim: “We are not bought off, we have not been paid, the decision has not been made,” he said.

    Delaney was one of the six people present who spoke in support of offshore wind. Three of them cited the need to fight climate change but called for further environmental review before the lease areas go out to bid.

    Another contingent was trade union members. John Dunderdale, representing the United Brotherhood of Carpenters & Joiners of America, said Vineyard Wind had created jobs and that this project could drive a similar economic boom here.

    The recent turbine breakage at Vineyard Wind, which left Nantucket beaches strewn with foam and fiberglass and forced beach closures, loomed large in the evening’s conversation.

    “Every time it blows easterly over 60 miles an hour, we’re going to have these things busting apart and blowing up off our national seashore?” asked Adams. Elena Rice, co-owner of Reel Deal Fishing Charters in Truro, said boating amid such debris would be dangerous.

    Vineyard Wind reported on Saturday that debris from the turbine was spotted east of Chatham, and Truro Town Manager Darrin Tangeman said he was informed by Vineyard Wind that debris might wash onto Truro beaches in the coming days, though so far no Outer Cape towns have reported turbine debris here.

    As the meeting drew to a close, several speakers said they did not believe BOEM was taking their complaints seriously: “You’re not really looking for participation, you’re just checking off the boxes,” said Sandy Jones from Barnstable.

    “I hope we’re not wasting time here tonight,” said Falmouth Select Board member Doug Brown.

    “There’s checking boxes, and there’s really doing something,” said Provincetown Select Board member Leslie Sandberg. “You’re listening to us, but are you hearing us?”

    WIND ENERGY

    Leaders Ask BOEM for Time and Information

    The goal is ‘a seat at the table’ as offshore wind plans advance

    By

    WELLFLEET — Plans for permitting the construction of wind farms in the Gulf of Maine have been in the works at the U.S. Dept. of the Interior since at least 2021. But for many municipal leaders on Cape Cod, those plans came into view only on April 30, after the department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) announced the proposed auction of eight potential lease areas — including one about 23 miles off the back shore of the Outer Cape.

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