Stakeholders at a virtual public hearing on Thursday praised the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management for working through the pandemic and urged the agency to approve the 800-MW Vineyard Wind offshore wind project along with the 1-nautical-mile turbine spacing advocated by developers and recommended by the U.S. Coast Guard.

“I’d like to go on record in supporting the 1-mile distancing between towers,” said Brad Lima, recently retired as chief academic officer of the Massachusetts Maritime Academy. “There was one statement in the [May 14] Coast Guard report that stood out: ‘Anything that can be done to reduce traffic scenarios is a prudent decision.’ … It’s quite evident based on the number of companies which have won leases for the Atlantic Coast sites that offshore wind is where power generation wants to be.”

BOEM’s supplemental environmental impact statement (SEIS) for the Vineyard Wind project, released June 9, included a proposal by the Responsible Offshore Development Association (RODA), a fishing industry group, calling for six “transit lanes” at least 4 nautical miles wide for a projected 22 GW of projects from the coasts of New England to Virginia. (See BOEM Issues Revised EIS for Vineyard Wind.)

The proposed transit corridor would provide a path for vessels traveling from New Bedford, Mass., and other southern New England ports to fishing grounds in Georges Bank, east of Cape Cod. Only one of the lanes intersects the Vineyard Wind 1 wind development area in federal waters south of Massachusetts.

The report also reflects changes to the Vineyard project since the draft EIS: replacing 696-feet-tall, 10-MW turbines with 837-feet-tall, 14-MW turbines. The SEIS found that the cumulative effect of the 22 GW of projects could have major impacts on navigation and vessel traffic, commercial fisheries, and military and national security uses.

Cumulative Impacts

“Global climate change presents a serious threat to the commonwealth’s environment, residents, communities and economy,” said Lisa Engler, director of the Massachusetts Office of Coastal Zone Management (CZM). “Gov. [Charlie] Baker has expressed the need for action. The magnitude of the impacts from climate change requires all of us to put politics aside and act together quickly and decisively.

“We still have the ability to check the severity of future impacts by aggressively reducing greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to the changes,” Engler said. “The cumulative analysis included in the SEIS ensures that potential impacts beyond this individual project are evaluated.”

Engler said the state’s review, which included the Department of Environmental Protection, Energy Facilities Siting Board, Environmental Policy Act Office, Department of Public Utilities and the CZM, is complete.

The total project capacity still remains at 800 MW, and a change to the turbine capacity would not result in a change to the footprint or to the 8-MW minimum turbine capacity, said BOEM environmental coordinator Jennifer Bucatari, who presented the agency’s summary of the SEIS. The project will comprise up to 100 wind turbines.

Vineyard Wind also submitted changes expanding the onshore substation, with a total area of ground disturbance of 7.7 acres, which is 1.8 acres greater than the area analyzed in the draft EIS, she said.

As for the various transit lane proposals and the turbine locations they would displace, “under the current cumulative scenario, displacement of all these turbine locations is not feasible, and therefore the addition of all six transit lanes would lead to the elimination of some of the turbines that could have occurred within these lanes,” Bucatari said.

Competitor Concerns

David Hardy, COO of Ørsted North America Offshore, praised BOEM’s work on the supplemental EIS. “It is no small feat to forecast the myriad impacts the development of a new ocean-based resource will have on the human and natural environment, both positive and negative,” he said.

Ørsted has been awarded more than 2,900 MW of offtake rights, with the states of Connecticut, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Virginia having all awarded their first offshore projects to the company.

Hardy said Ørsted “strongly” supported the developers’ consensus proposal of 1-nautical-mile turbine spacing, with an east-west layout for simpler navigation.

He said RODA’s proposed 4-mile spacing “would result in the loss of over 50 wind turbine locations from our current three projects: South Fork, Revolution Wind and Sunrise Wind. … This equates to a nearly 25% loss in the total wind turbine locations for our state” power purchase agreements.

The SEIS should reflect a more favorable rating of offshore wind as a domestic economic development engine consistent with ongoing and planned investments, Hardy said, noting Ørsted is planning to spend $15 billion over the next decade in the U.S.

“For many of the cumulative impact parameters considered in the SEIS, BOEM chose not to incorporate widely accepted or legally mandated mitigation strategies; thus the bottom-line impact of the 22-GW buildout must be considered a worst-case scenario and not as representative of as-constructed impacts,” Hardy said.

Where BOEM comes out on the Vineyard project will likely determine the fate of offshore wind in the whole country, said Joe Martens, director of the New York Offshore Wind Alliance and former commissioner of the New York Department of Environmental Conservation.

“A plain reading of the SEIS could lead to the conclusion that if the Vineyard Wind project is not advanced, other projects in various stages in the pipeline inevitably will,” Martens said. “I don’t think this is the case. … The [Vineyard] developers have gone above and beyond the extensive federal, state and local requirements for offshore wind.”

The Vineyard project is in effect a “litmus test” for the industry, he said, urging its approval on both environmental and economic grounds. “All eyes are on this project.”

Communities Supportive

The project has been thoroughly vetted by all the “top notch” environmental groups and should be approved to provide more renewable energy for the state, said Eileen Mathieu, board member of Sustainable Marblehead, a volunteer community organization in the town of Marblehead, Mass.

“In Marblehead, our municipal light department … is eager to be able to purchase reasonably priced electricity from renewable sources,” Mathieu said. “However, local resources are very constrained, so that right now we only have 12% renewable energy in our portfolio and 26% nuclear.”

Marblehead buys its power through the Massachusetts Municipal Wholesale Electric Co., which “needs wind options to provide its 22 municipal light plant members, and currently it has none,” Mathieu said.

“We strongly support this project as the first large-scale OSW project in the region,” said Kai Salem, policy advocate for the Green Energy Consumers Alliance.

Fred Hopps of Beverly, Mass., founder of the town’s clean energy advisory committee — and a former resident of Copenhagen, Denmark — gave “a thousand thanks to the Danes for practically single-handedly keeping offshore wind energy alive.”

BOEM will hold two more web-based public hearings on the SEIS for Vineyard Wind, on July 7 and 9, with the public comment period open through July 27 on a dedicated website. The agency expects to publish its final EIS in November and to issue a final decision in December.

Vineyard Wind is a joint venture between Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners and Avangrid Renewables.