The Biden administration is looking at offshore wind farms in the Gulf of Mexico to reduce American dependence on fossil fuels. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Fisheries Division wants to be able to do this without negatively impacting the endangered marine species which it manages.
On Monday, a new peer-reviewed study, “Protected species considerations for ocean planning: A case study for offshore wind energy development in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico,” was published in Marine and Coastal Fisheries. The study details NOAA’s efforts to accomplish both goals. It is part of a special theme issue of the online journal entitled “Offshore Wind Interactions with Fish and Fisheries.” The issue will feature several more NOAA Fisheries-authored papers on offshore wind energy topics as they are published.
This paper details NOAA Fisheries’ development of scoring methods to assess potential protected species conflicts with offshore wind. NOAA National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management developed spatial models used in the study. The generalized scoring approach considers species conservation status and demographic information.
In the spatial models, a score of one reflects an area with low siting conflicts. A score of zero reflects an area with high siting conflicts. The paper evaluated the spatial distributions for 23 species listed under the U.S. Endangered Species Act and Marine Mammal Protection Act, identifying high-use and low-use areas for each species and scoring these areas from 0.1 to 0.9. A score of 0.1 reflected a high-use area for an endangered species with a small and declining population; a score of 0.9 reflected a low-use area for a non-strategic MMPA stock.
NOAA said that the researchers combined these layers spatially and integrated them into the siting model. The NOAA Fisheries combined layer informed relative risk for siting wind energy activities in a given area while accounting for the overlap of different protected species.
This integration resulted in a 70 percent reduction in potential siting conflicts with protected species within the final selected wind energy area. These estimates are based on current and expected species occurrence and distribution patterns. This work represented a successful collaboration between NOAA Fisheries, NOAA National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science, and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.
The goal was to proactively minimize potential interactions between renewable energy development and protected species. The approach is straightforward, repeatable, and transferable to other regions, to other sensitive or protected species, and to other marine spatial planning applications. However, these are static models. NOAA Fisheries needs continuous monitoring data to ensure models can be adapted to shifting species distributions due to climate change or ecosystem perturbations.
NOAA hopes that this collaborative work will provide a foundation for early engagement and strategic marine spatial planning for offshore wind energy to reduce potential adverse effects on protected species. It also provides a reference for work conducted to inform this process and a template for other regions as these efforts expand.
Last year the Biden Administration announced that the first two of its planned wind farms will be off the coast of Galveston, Texas, and Lake Charles, Louisiana.
The Galveston wind farm will be developed 24 nautical miles off the coast of Galveston, covering a total of 546,645 acres and will power 2.3 million homes, according to the U.S. Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. The Louisiana wind farm will be about 56 nautical miles off the coast of Lake Charles, Louisiana, and will cover 188,023 acres with the potential to power 799,000 homes. The Biden Administration has not yet announced its plans for the Alabama Gulf Coast.
There are concerns that wind farms in the Gulf of Mexico will be cost-prohibitive and that hurricanes will do substantial damage to offshore wind farms making recovery from future hurricanes even more protracted. This is on top of the environmental concerns that the NOAA study seeks to address.
There is also a significant cost element to this. One researcher estimates that it would cost four times as much money to produce electricity from Gulf of Mexico wind farms as it does to produce it from natural gas in Louisiana now.
Producing more green energy will almost certainly result in substantially higher electric bills for American consumers.
There are currently only two operational offshore wind farms in the U.S. – one off of the coast of Rhode Island and the other off of the coast of Virginia.
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