Landmark study to health-check Vineyard Wind marine impact in US Atlantic

Long-view research project between developer of country's first utility-scale project and state university will monitor marine ecosystem around 800MW array for environmental impact, including to the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale

Critically endangered North Atlantic right whale breachesFoto: NOAA Fisheries

Tim Ferry

Vineyard Wind, developer of the US’ first commercial-scale project, the 800MW Vineyard Wind 1, is teaming up with a state university on a new multi-year study to monitor the marine ecosystem in the array’s lease area for signs of impact linked to the development off the coast of Massachusetts, including to the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale.

Vineyard Wind 1, being built via a joint venture (JV) between Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners (CIP) and Iberdrola subsidiary Avangrid, will partner with the University of New Hampshire (UNH) on a five-year programme to deploy passive acoustic monitoring devices to collect data from the site of the project, where construction is slated to start offshore in early 2023.

“Our collaboration with UNH allows us to leverage their significant local expertise and build on existing scientific capacity in New England [that] will allow us to make informed, science-based decisions [to] allow responsible wind energy development with minimal impact on the marine environment,” said Vineyard Wind CEO Klaus Skoust Moeller.

Jennifer Miksis-Olds, professor and director of UNH’s Center for Acoustics Research and Education, underlined that acoustic monitoring was vital to assessing the health of the marine environment because “sound is the main sensory modality for marine animals [and] plays a role in all aspects of marine mammals lives”.

She added: “Understanding what humans are contributing to that overall soundscape is important to understand how an activity is contributing to a regional environmental status.”

The programme will leverage UNH’s ongoing acoustic monitoring of the larger central and north Atlantic region to gain more comprehensive data on the effects of offshore wind farm developments on the US outer continental shelf (OCS).

The Massachusetts’ wind energy area hosts several of the US’ earliest and most prominent offshore wind developments as well as some of the richest marine ecosystems in the US which attract both a high value commercial fishing fleet and multiple marine mammal species, including the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale.

As such, Vineyard Wind is a lightning rod for criticism for fisheries and environmentalists alike and is the subject of multiple lawsuits that are winding through federal and state courts.

A chief criticism of the project – and the industry – is that per federal regulation, the environmental impact of any given offshore wind project is assessed only on the specific lease area, while the impacts may actually be distributed across the entire regional ecosystem.

Miksis-Olds told Recharge that incorporating the data generated at the Vineyard Wind lease area into UNH’s larger environmental acoustic monitoring system will provide insight into the impact of offshore wind across the Atlantic seaboard.

“We'll be able to interpret the data that we're getting in the lease data in the context of a greater regional East Coast acoustic environment,” she said. The programme “will be a model for future ocean users to be sound environmental stewards”.

This context will be critical as the offshore wind industry ramps up along the Atlantic coast. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), the federal agency charged with managing offshore wind development on OCS, auctioned over 480,000 acres of offshore wind leasing in the New York Bight and will hold another lease auction off the coast of North Carolina next month as it strives for the Biden administration's goal of 30GW by 2030. Further auctions are being planned for vast acreage in the Central Atlantic.

Landmark study to health-check Vineyard Wind marine impact in US Atlantic

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