Author: David Wojik
BOEM is seeking comments on its draft planned environmental impact statements (PEIS) for five floating offshore wind lease projects off the California coast. I was doing research before commenting and this is my first report, other commenters may find it useful.
The deadline for comments is February 12, so the final EIS will be the responsibility of the Trump administration. That could make comments against the plan more important than before, when they were largely ignored.
For information on PEIS and how to comment, see https://www.boem.gov/renewable-energy/state-activities/california-offshore-wind-programmatic-environmental-impact
This is BOEM’s second offshore wind power PEIS. The first was a group of leases near New York, and it was brutal. This one still sucks, but it has some useful features worth pointing out.
Note that this is the first floating wind turbine and is very different from the stationary turbines built along the Atlantic coast. Floating wind is still an immature technology, with a number of proposed designs but none of which have been tested at commercial utility scale. There are only a few small demonstration-scale projects in the world.
This PEIS has at least two advantages. First up is a very good tutorial on floating wind, focusing on the California case. This is Appendix A, completed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. They ruled out many design options, including the most popular ones shown. The vast number of options they offer shows the immaturity of the technology.
Second, PEIS provides an encyclopedic discussion of the many potential adverse effects of large-scale floating wind schemes. That's exactly what's expected in each of the five leases, so there's already a lot to dislike about the plan.
Here's a quick list of some of the biggest flaws discovered so far.
By far the biggest issue is the lack of cumulative multiple lease impact assessments. The whole purpose of PEIS is to make such an assessment. The cumulative impact can be much greater than the sum of the individual project impacts, especially where two or more projects are closely clustered, as in this example.
In many cases, adverse effects are only mentioned without an assessment of the potential harm.
There is no discussion of the systematic harassment of large numbers of endangered and protected whales and other animals. In fact, the word “harassment” appears only twice in the entire main report. Deaths from noise disturbance are one of the most serious adverse effects of offshore winds.
Additionally, drifting winds introduce a major non-acoustic form of disturbance. This is a 3D network of thousands of mooring lines, each up to a mile long. We're probably talking hundreds of square miles of deep ocean, literally filled with a web of cables. Harassment is defined as causing a change in the behavior of a protected animal, and these horrific networks certainly do that.
PEIS does briefly mention the threat of “secondary entanglements” from netting, wires and other debris on cables over time. The potential adverse effects of this lethal accumulation need to be assessed in detail.
There is an extensive section on economics at the end, but no mention of costs. The development of these five leases could cost taxpayers and ratepayers tens, if not hundreds, of billions of dollars, but these staggering amounts have never been quantified. Job creation is viewed in detail as a benefit, when in fact jobs are a cost.
This is just a quick look, but it's clear this PEIS is woefully inadequate. In fact, it specifically avoids those issues that would justify canceling the program. Stay tuned for more discoveries.
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