US kick-starts weather and wildlife data gathering initiative for Northeast offshore wind

The US Department of Energy (DoE) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Thursday announced a joint 18-month initiative to gather extensive weather, ocean, and wildlife data near the sites of active offshore wind farms and lease areas facing the coastal Northeast.

DoE and NOAA, under the Department of Commerce, will deploy state-of-the-art remote sensing instruments, offshore buoys, and towers off the coasts of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Long Island, New York, where three wind farms, 800MW Vineyard Wind, 30MW Block Island, and 132MW South Fork, are already in operation or under construction.

“Our oceans are the next frontier for clean energy deployment,” said Alejandro Moreno, associate principal deputy assistant secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy at DoE.

“Understanding the offshore environment better is a ‘grand challenge’ that DoE and its partners are addressing to ensure that offshore wind can not only operate efficiently and sustainably, but also contribute to grid reliability in the energy system of the future,” he added.

Starting 15 February, the instruments will collect real-time data on a wide range of weather-related variables “for maximising wind plant output and efficiently managing wind farms”, DoE said.

Dave Turner, manager of NOAA’s Atmospheric Science for Renewable Energy Programme, added the major goal is “to use these insights to improve NOAA’s operational weather prediction models, which often serve as the foundational forecasts for the energy community in their daily management of their wind plants.”

This effort is the third phase of interagency Wind Forecast Improvement Project (WFIP3) and will also monitor wildlife in the WEAs, including whales, birds, and bats.

Wildlife data “will improve our understanding of movement patterns and provide insight into the potential effects of offshore wind construction on wildlife in the region,” the agencies said.

The US offshore wind sector took great strides last year with the start of installation and power delivery from its first two commercial scale projects, Vineyard and South Fork, but also struggled with deteriorating economics amid surging inflation and interest rates and public backlash from fisheries and environmentalists.

Massachusetts alone saw 2.4GW of project capacity withdrawn, and while lawsuits filed by environmentalists and fisheries against Vineyard were dismissed in federal court, opposition continues to mount to that project and the entire Northeast sector amid an ongoing rash of whale strandings blamed on the sector that has left dozens of marine mammals dead on area beaches