With Wind Farms Looming and Fishermen Worrying, States Seek Unified Oversight for Compensation

Nine states along the Eastern Seaboard are seeking to appoint a single administrator in charge of overseeing mitigation and compensation payments to commercial fishermen for economic losses they may suffer due to the coming explosion of new offshore wind farms.

All the coastal states from Maine to Virginia this week signed on to a request for information, seeking input from the fishing industry, offshore wind developers and other interested parties about how a coast-wide fisheries administrator might operate.

With numbers of offshore wind farm developments poised to mushroom from just five working turbines to several hundred in just the next few years, and likely thousands over the coming decades, fishermen have expressed grave fears that their industry will be hit hard.

Fishermen have said they worry noise or electromagnetic pulses from the wind farms will change fish migration patterns, or that their construction will destroy habitat or spawning grounds that seed their stocks. But mitigation payments focus primarily on direct economic losses, because of forced closures of some fishing grounds during construction, or entanglements of fishing gear on wind farm infrastructure, like power cables laid on the sea floor.

Fishermen say that there should be a robust compensation fund set aside for each new wind farm, to protect fishermen from unforeseen impacts to their livelihoods. Wind farm developers have said they will compensate fishermen justly but have raised concerns about false or overblown claims and impacts that they should not be blamed for.

“How they structure this fund, and how much money they … put into this account, for the long haul — which means for the lifetime of these projects — will determine whether the states are really serious about protecting its commercial fisherman and its commercial fishing industry,” said Bonnie Brady, director of the Long Island Commercial Fishing Alliance. “Otherwise, it’s just window dressing and the cruelest of Christmas presents for our coastal communities.”

Comments about the regional mitigation project can be submitted until January 31, 2023, atoffshorewindpower.org/fisheries-mitigation-project.

With the infrastructure for South Fork Wind’s 12 turbines currently being installed in Wainscott, the project’s developers, Ørsted and Eversource, say that their next project, Sunrise Wind, reached an important milestone in its federal approval process this week with the release of the draft environmental impact statement, which details all of the project’s components and details and concerns about its construction and operations.

Sunrise Wind will comprise 100 turbines to be built in the ocean southeast of Montauk, adjacent to South Fork Wind. The power from Sunrise Wind will be sent through an undersea cable to a landing in Smith Point Park, just west of Moriches Inlet, where it will run inland to connect to a LIPA substation.