The U.S. federal government recently invested in works by several foreign organizations aimed at creating offshore wind farms to generate electricity. This is part of a larger effort to establish cleaner alternatives to traditional methods of propulsion and power generation. These farms employ an array of widely spaced wind turbines—often confused with windmills—that work together to harness wind energy and convert it into electricity for use back on land.
This sounds like a good idea, in theory. However, installing and operating wind farms requires invasive seabed surveying and construction techniques, occupies vast expanses of the ocean surface, and risks long-term or even permanent alterations to ocean ecosystems. Additionally, the large expanses of once public ocean used by wind farm organizations risk falling under their jurisdiction.
It’s no surprise that wind farms, and the organizations responsible for establishing and operating them, have come under the scrutiny of concerned fishermen whose lifestyles and livelihoods depend on the stability and free access to these waters.
One voice particularly, that of Maryland conch fisherman Jimmy Hahn, rises above them all. A fisherman by trade, Hahn and other commercial fishermen have been the primary voices of opposition keeping the wind farm companies in check. He firmly believes this is a concern of all professional fishers, whether commercial or sport, and sees his role as leading a call to action from the entire U.S. fishing community.
“It’s going to affect every charter boat, every commercial fisherman and every recreational fisherman, and the sportfishing world hasn’t woken up and realized it yet,” says Hahn. “I swear, half the people in the industry don’t even know we’re getting wind farms. We’re getting ready to lose all our historical fishing ground for the next five to 10 years, and I really, truly don’t understand why the sportfishing community isn’t screaming about this.”
Overview of Wind Farming
The physical principle of a wind farm rests on the ability to convert one manifestation of physical energy (the mechanical energy provided by moving air) into another type (electric current). Because wind is a natural expression of the earth’s atmosphere, it doesn’t require the combustion of a fuel source traditionally used for electricity generation, such as coal. Neither does it carry the ominous reputation of a nuclear power plant.
Harnessed by enormous wind turbines, natural wind circulating over landscapes turns a turbine’s three gigantic blades—each of which can exceed the length of a 737 airliner—to generate a vast amount of electricity. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the average wind turbine used today can generate enough electricity to power 940 standard-sized suburban homes. Working in tandem, tens or hundreds of these windmills can generate enough electricity to power a city. Although it sounds attractive, harnessing wind power comes with its own challenges and drawbacks.
Clearing large tracts of land to provide room for dozens of these enormous machines and reports of mass deaths of migratory birds killed in the turbines’ deadly blades have driven a movement to relocate large wind farms offshore. This, combined with an increasingly urgent political incentive to derive more energy from sources that don’t significantly increase the atmosphere’s concentration of carbon dioxide, has rapidly increased the number of large-scale offshore wind farms off U.S. coasts. A majority have sprung up within the past five years.
Like land-based wind farms, offshore wind farms present their own ecological and socioeconomic problems. Turbines must be anchored by large supporting scaffolds anchored firmly to the ocean floor. These structures support the turbines and the accessory equipment needed to process and distribute the electricity generated back to the grid. The surveying techniques required to perform this task must be extremely precise and often risk disrupting the ecosystems of the seafloor. The turbines themselves, scattered across the ocean’s surface, can also disrupt the flow of marine life and ocean currents that distribute fish populations. Besides the destruction of seafloor life, fishing equipment based on the seafloor, such as crab traps, are often destroyed in the surveying process. These ecosystems usually recover, though it can take months or years. Some may never recover completely or recover with an altered balance. Fishers who rely on the creatures supported by these ecosystems can face hardships in their work and way of life.
A Call To Action
In November 2021, Delmarva Now ran a story documenting the sabotage that Jimmy Hahn’s annual conch harvest suffered because of the invasive surveying methods employed by U.S. Wind to map the ocean floor off Maryland in preparation for wind turbine installation. The organization’s wind power efforts are listed on its website under two separate project names: MarWin and Momentum Wind. The website has a dedicated page for fishermen. A pledge is written on this page: “We are eager to hear from and listen to, local fishermen and mariners on all aspects of our offshore project activities so that we can coordinate, collaborate, and coexist.”
Not everyone in the fishing industry is satisfied with efforts thus far to uphold this promise. Hahn estimates the damage that U.S. Wind caused to his equipment at around $150,000. So far, he says the company has not reimbursed him for the loss of his catch or destroyed equipment.
“I haven’t received a penny from them,” he laments.
Hahn is a commercial fisherman who employs a system of rigged traps, many of which are hand-built and rest on the ocean bottom collecting conch snails and crabs. His work is based in Ocean City, Maryland, though he also works off the coast of New Jersey. In addition, he works as a charter fisherman through the organization M.R. Ducks.
Four years ago, U.S. Wind began laying the groundwork for a new wind farm over the site of Hahn’s familiar fishing grounds. Then, as if to take the situation from bad to worse, the Danish organization Ørsted began work two years later on another wind energy project, called Garden State Offshore Energy, LLC, over his New Jersey fishing grounds. For Hahn, four years of wind farm preparation has meant four years of invasive seabed surveys, four years of spoiled catches and damaged traps, and no accountability.
“They do a sonic air blast survey,” Hahn says, describing the effect created by the specialized equipment. “It is the same technique that the oil and gas industry use, which environmentalists are 100 percent against. Basically, what the oil and gas industry is not allowed to do anymore, the wind farms are doing now. And the environmentalists don’t care. They think it’s great because we’ll have green energy down the road. But when they get done doing their sonic blasting on our bottom, they kill everything that lives in the sand. Whatever can’t swim away, will die. In the areas off Maryland and Delaware, we’ve got 160,000 acres of our historical fishing bottom that’s 100 percent dead. We can’t catch anything from it. There are no crabs. There are no conchs. There are no invertebrates. Everything that lives in the sand—that is, everything that used to live there—is gone.”
BIDEN MOVES TO INCREASE OFFSHORE WIND FARMING VIA FLOATING PLATFORMS
Motivated partially by commitments made by his administration to maintaining international standards set by the Paris Climate Agreement, President Joe Biden is seeking to augment his clean energy plans through offshore wind farming. Specifically, by placing additional wind turbine systems at sea on floating platforms that rest on the ocean’s surface.
This effort is being threaded into a larger 15-year plan by the Biden Administration to generate at least 45 gigawatts of power or enough energy to power 15 million homes, through offshore wind farming by 2035, according to a recent Associated Press report. Many of these new wind farms will be located off the central and southern California coasts, the first on the U.S. West Coast. The initiative also includes provisions for floating wind farms off the coast of Maine. According to a press release by the White House published on September 15, the new wind farms are expected to create upwards of 77,000 new jobs.
According to Hahn, the survey boats have been a constant nuisance, and rarely a day goes by where he or a colleague does not get into a confrontation.
“I’ve been documenting this for the past three or four years, every time they come in to do their surveys,” he says. “We’ll have conchs in our pots, we’ll have spider crabs in our pots, and if they ride over our pots, they kill whatever is inside. I don’t understand what they’re still surveying for. We keep asking them, and they keep telling us they still need more information.”
Hahn insists that he is far from alone in suffering these kinds of damages to his equipment. The surveying work by U.S. Wind and Ørsted is affecting everyone working in the local fishing industry.
“They’ve messed up every commercial fisherman’s gear,” he emphasizes. “Whether it’s sea bass fishermen, lobster trappers or conch fishermen… pretty much every commercial fisherman has had some kind of interaction with them, and they’re not held accountable for any of their actions.”
Unfortunately, the surveys are only the beginning of troubles for the local fishing communities around these budding wind farms. Next to follow is the construction of wind farms. Performing this requires the acquisition of special permits, which allows organizations like U.S. Wind and Ørsted to establish perimeters around their construction work, sometimes miles in girth, that resident boaters are forbidden to cross.
“Once the construction starts on these windmills, we’re not going to be allowed anywhere near the construction area,” states Hahn. “These organizations have orders in effect now where, if they wanted to, they could shut down a five-mile block of the ocean around each windmill under construction. Say they had 10 windmills going up at once, they could shut down 50 miles of ocean. We could not ride through it. We could not fish around it. When you start talking about fishing tournaments, we might have to make a 50-mile detour around the windmill farm, which will make the whole operation inaccessible to a whole bunch of people. It’s going to change up a lot of people’s ability to even go fishing.”
But it’s not just the restrictions that will cause a problem for local fishers. In the long term, the construction and operation of these vast wind farms can disrupt local fish populations, with catastrophic effects sometimes lasting decades.
“When they start construction, they’ve said themselves, that all the fish in the area will leave the region from between six months and a year,” says Hahn. “Construction on the windmills is expected to take between five and 10 years for 125 windmills in each area. So for the next five to 10 years—according to them!—we’re not going to have any fish in this area.”
Despite this seemingly inevitable blight, Hahn insists that there is still a glimmer of hope. A chance to act. But it’s a very short-lived opportunity to either turn these wind farms around and send them out the back door or else hold their operators financially accountable for the damages and losses they inflict on surrounding fishing communities. But insists Hahn, if any hope is to be expected in the long term, the sportfishing community needs to realize the threat.
“There is enough money in the sportfishing community that we could shut this down without a problem,” he insists. “The windmill companies do not have their permits yet. They’re working to acquire them. But we could shut them down if we can get the necessary political support. We need the sportfishing community to stand alongside the commercial fishing community, which has been fighting this battle alone for the past five years, so we can get this shut down so we can have our ocean back. Or else we’re gonna lose it.”
This article first appeared in InTheBite Sportfishing Magazine. Subscribe to read more articles like this!
