Is Dominion’s offshore wind project ‘arbitrary and capricious’? NOAA says YES!
By Collister Johnson |May 27th, 2023
Recently, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has been issuing a raft of “Incidental Harassment Authorizations” (IHA) to offshore wind developers. The IHAs allow the developers to “harass” marine mammals – including critically endangered Right Whales – as long as the activity is “incidental” to some form of offshore wind development approved by the authorities.
When the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA) was passed by Congress the lawmakers had in mind ‘incidental’ activities such as marine research work. Wind developers, however, have been applying for these permits as part of their “preconstruction” work – primarily sonar mapping of the ocean floor to plot the placement of connector cables and wind towers. Over the last two years, 16 of these IHA’s were approved by NOAA for developers of wind generation projects up and down the East Coast. Each of them allowed “incidental” activity only for a period of one year.
Just as critics of these IHAs feared, after these permits were authorized and preconstruction activity began, dozens of dead whales and dolphins started washing up on beaches from New York to Virginia. This prompted NOAA to issue a “Notice of Unusual Mortality Event”, which didn’t suspend the sonar mapping but did indicate that NOAA finally recognized, in the famous words of Apollo 11, “Houston, we have a problem”.
https://www.cfact.org/2023/05/27/is-dominions-offshore-wind-project-arbitrary-and-capricious-noaa-says-yes/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=is-dominions-offshore-wind-project-arbitrary-and-capricious-noaa-says-yes&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=is-dominions-offshore-wind-project-arbitrary-and-capricious-noaa-says-yes
