A coalition of seafood harvesters, processors and others has launched a new website aimed at slowing down the Biden administration’s fast-tracked effort to build towering wind-energy farms off the Oregon coast.
Working under the name Protect US Fishermen, the 25-member coalition is sounding alarms that the proposed farms, consisting of floating wind turbines tethered to the ocean floor, could have potentially catastrophic impacts on large sections of traditional fishing grounds.
Heather Mann, executive director of the Newport-based Midwater Trawlers Cooperative and a coalition member, said the new website can help Oregonians who are unaware of the government’s ongoing efforts to lease up to 2,200 square miles of ocean from Coos Bay south to Brookings for off-shore wind-power development.
“In a state as environmentally conscious as Oregon, I find it disturbing that the administration and many legislators are either unaware or are simply ignoring the well-documented science about negative impacts on the marine environment from turbine farms,” Mann said in a statement.
The coalition’s new website is www.protectUSfishermen.org.
A number of coastal cities, counties, tribes and other groups have passed resolutions in recent weeks asking the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy, which is spearheading the wind-farm leasing process, to provide additional time to study the proposal’s economic and environmental impacts.
The Biden administration is hoping to create 30 gigawatts of electricity-generating capacity through offshore wind by 2030. Although the first leases off the Oregon coast could be awarded as later this year, wind-energy experts familiar with the process have said it could be years before the first turbines are actually deployed and linked to the state’s electrical grid.
I have read multiple stories in recent months about the fishing industry complaining about offshore wind farms. But I have yet to read a single detail of what exactly the problem is. Fisherman need to explain to the public exactly how wind farms would hurt their business. Until I hear that I’m all for wind farms offshore. And all the complaining seems a bit unseemly from an industry responsible for the deadly entanglement of marine mammals around the world.