CFACT blasts offshore wind multiple-site assessment as ridiculous
March 6th, 2024|122 Comments
CFACT has long called for an environmental assessment of the combined impact of the clusters of huge offshore wind facilities being pushed by the Feds. Each facility is being separately assessed even when they share a boundary.
In many cases, it is clear that the adverse impacts will overlap and compound the harm to marine life. An obvious example is the incredibly loud and potentially harmful noise of pile driving. This noise carries over fifty miles, so if two sites are pile driving within a few miles of each other, the noise has to be much worse when the impacts combine.
The Federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is supposed to do environmental assessment of offshore wind (even though their mandate is to get it built). They finally produced a combined assessment for six facilities off of New York and New Jersey. It is grandly called a Programmatic Environmental Impact Assessment (PEIS) of the New York Bight.
CFACT’s official comments on this assessment are pretty clear: it is junk. Here are some telling excerpts:
https://www.cfact.org/2024/03/06/cfact-blasts-offshore-wind-multiple-site-assessment-as-ridiculous/
