The drive to develop U.S. offshore wind industry is growing along the West Coast, and fishermen should pay close attention to the political and legal battles already ongoing in the Atlantic states, a panel of experienced activists said at the Pacific Marine Expo Thursday in Seattle.
“I’ve been fighting offshore wind since 2003,” said Bonnie Brady, executive director of the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association. In those early years, the first proposed projects “died because of the cost,” she said.
Today, “there are a multitude of projects going on,” Brady said, as a screen flashed map graphics showing about 30 proposed wind turbine developments from the Gulf of Maine to the Carolinas, and now more off California and Oregon.
California fishermen were later observers to what is now a concerted push by federal and state governments, but now they too are alarmed, said Jeremiah O’Brien, vice president of the Morro Bay Commercial Fishermen’s Association.
“In 2015 we were watching what Bonnie and all the folks on the East Coast were dealing with and didn’t like what we saw,” said O’Brien. Eight years later, wind power developers “still believe mitigation will not be necessary” to compensate fishermen for the loss of fishing grounds when turbine arrays are built, he said.
“We’re not against wind power. We are against the areas where wind power is being proposed,” said O’Brien. The floating wind turbines envisioned for deepwater Pacific sites would make it impossible to fish amid the arrays and their anchoring cables, potentially affecting 4,500 square miles of ocean that “will cripple individual ports,” he said.
Six Northeast states are heavily committed to offshore wind – so much that their governors asked President Biden in September to boost tax credits and other incentives to help keep offshore wind developers from backing out of their existing power purchase agreements with the states. On the West Coast, state policies still vary at this point, said Mike Conroy of West Coast Fisheries Consultants.
“California is all in, without knowing what offshore wind is about,” said Conroy, who is working with the Responsible Offshore Development Alliance, a coalition of U.S. fishing groups and communities affected by offshore wind proposals. Oregon officials are taking a more measured approach, asking the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to take more time as it reviews wind energy areas in Northwest waters, he said.
Washington State has yet to make firm commitments. But Gov. Jay Inslee was recently in Seattle, talking up the potential for West Coast wind power to bring new business to the state’s maritime industry, Conroy noted.
Brady and Conroy urged West Coast fishermen to pay close attention to developments and to organize now to protect their future.