Forum on Offshore Wind Tussles with Topics of Nuclear Power, Whales, Costs and Sacrifice

NEWPORT, RI — A public discussion Wednesday evening that was billed as “Setting the Record Straight on Offshore Wind” produced a few areas of general agreement between the pro- and anti-offshore wind attendees in the audience:

Yes, we Americans should reduce our excessive consumption. Yes, we should develop backup and renewable sources of electricity as an alternative to burning oil and gas. And, yes, we all love and cherish our oceans.

Beyond those issues, the overwhelming sense was that of exasperation between the audience of about 90 people, most of whom seemed to oppose offshore wind, and the panel members, some of whom favored developing offshore wind as a tool to fight greenhouse gases, global warming, and climate change.

The two-hour forum was hosted by ecoRI News and co-sponsored by the Pulitzer Center. It was moderated by Mike Stanton, a journalism professor at the University of Connecticut and president of the ecoRI News board of directors.

The six-person panel answered written questions submitted by audience members and read by Stanton and got into several debates with those in attendance, including a heavy representation from Green Oceans, a nonprofit based in Little Compton that was formed in 2022 to fight offshore wind development.

The panel itself represented both pro- and anti-OSW sentiments. Panelists arguing for the need for offshore wind included Tricia Jedele, offshore wind policy manager at The Nature Conservancy; Bob Kenney, a University of Rhode Island (URI) marine mammal scientist; and Chris Kearns, acting commissioner of the Rhode Island Office of Energy Resources.

Panelists opposing offshore wind or who faulted the bureaucratic process of permitting wind farms included Michael Lombardi of CMarTech, a diver and contractor; and Rich Hittinger, a member of the state Fishermen’s Advisory Board and vice president of the Rhode Island Saltwater Anglers Association. Panelist Frank Carini, an ecoRI News senior reporter who has written often about disinformation about wind farms, spoke most fervently about excessive consumerism.

ecoRI News publisher Joanna Detz opened the session with some overarching themes. All forms of energy production “have always had a downstream effect,” she said. But for many Rhode Islanders, the stresses of fueling or producing electricity are “out of sight and out of mind,” Detz said. Resources come from “sacrifice zones” like Appalachian coal towns and “Cancer Alley” in Louisiana, the location of huge petrochemical plants, where people bear the many burdens of power production.

“Vulnerable people and nature have paid for our overconsumption habits,” Detz said. “We have not talked much about personal sacrifice.”

Under the 2021 Act on Climate law, the state of Rhode Island committed itself to 100% renewable electricity by 2033, a powerful effort that is being echoed by state governments up and down the East Coast. Experts in and outside the government have said the solution is to ramp up use of renewables — mainly solar and wind power — and to aim for a mixed portfolio of power sources. Now, the state relies heavily on natural gas imported from outside Rhode Island, to the tune of about $3 billion a year.

This supply is especially essential in winter. But also, in that season, the supply is volatile and prices swing widely. In winter, winds above the Atlantic are extra strong and able to generate electricity when the need is high and gas supplies are shaky. Offshore wind supporters consider ocean winds to be the region’s unique renewable energy resource.

Jedele said states are trying to decarbonize their power sources by 2050 to meet a goal set by the 2016 Paris Agreement, which warned of an unlivable planet if temperature increases continue. “We may not always have all of the data that we want to develop these [OSW] projects,” she said. “When we pick locations for offshore wind we should be informed by the best science.”

Opponents of wind farms often refer to this work as the “industrialization” of the ocean. Lombardi, who referred often to his diving work and his intimate understanding of the ocean, insisted that the ocean should not be disturbed by any human-made development. Such structures “are very detrimental to the environment,” Lombardi said. “When you introduce construction into the habitat you hurt the habitat. Massive construction in a pristine environment could lead to massive problems.”

Kenney retorted that the oceans have been industrialized “ever since the first human set a boat into them.” He said he was looking at the sea off Block Island once and “the turbines weren’t the most obvious thing I could see,” he said, referring to the five-turbine wind farm off the island’s coast. “The most obvious thing was a big ship bringing cars to Quonset.”

Carini, on the topic of industrialization, said, “The energy you are getting is industrializing someplace.” He referred to the massive 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion in the Gulf of Mexico and spoke about the longest oil spill in U.S. history — it lasted nearly two decades, from 2004 to 2022 — that originated from an abandoned offshore well in the Gulf of Mexico.

Addressing members of the audience, who were by then calling out questions back and forth to the panel, Carini asked, “So it is OK [to harm the environment] down there as long as we are getting the energy up here?”

A voice from the audience called out “nuclear!” — a reference to a recurring topic among wind farm opponents that small nuclear power plants, often called small modular reactors, should be widely deployed in this country to create energy without use of oil or gas.

Carini retorted, “So you want to build a nuclear power plant in Little Compton?”

Audience member Michael Armenia, an engineer who said he worked for Raytheon and also for the Navy on nuclear power projects, said small and safe nuclear plants can be built. He claimed that American-made plans for a liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR) were given by the U.S. to China in 2010 because Americans had lost hope that it would ever be developed here. In fact, according to the World Nuclear Association, a number of countries, including Germany, India, Canada, Japan, China, Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Russia, Brazil, the United Kingdom and the United States, have done basic development work on LFTRs. Armenia said that particular technology would not melt down or explode and would produce no radioactive waste. He noted that American giants like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are now trying to obtain or create nuclear plants to power their AI projects.

Carini pointed to the difficult questions that surround nuclear plant development: “How much fossil fuel will it take to build them?” and “What neighborhoods will they go in?” He asked the nuclear-enthusiastic audience, “If nuclear is a panacea, why aren’t we seeing it?”

Kearns referred to a very contentious and emotional four-year fight over a large fossil fuel-burning power plant proposed for Burrillville, which finally ended with the defeat of the project in 2019. He said, “Every form of energy is going to trigger some kind of reaction, good or bad.”

Any argument about offshore wind inevitably brings up the danger of hazards to marine mammals, particularly the endangered North Atlantic right whale. Green Oceans has repeatedly asserted that wind farm development harms or kills whales, partly because wind farm surveys got underway a few years after the start in 2017 of an unusual mortality event (UME), or an escalating increase in deaths of right whales from New Jersey to Maine.

Marine mammal experts from URI and other sources have repeatedly said there is no evidence of any connection between UMEs and wind farm work. Survey and construction work on wind farms, in fact, maintain very high standards of vigilance and avoidance of marine mammals, much higher than any other form of offshore work, including oil exploration and military. Federal law requires offshore wind developers to hire protected species observers during every phase of construction.

Kenney, an emeritus marine research scientist at the URI Graduate School of Oceanography, has said often that, where necropsies can be done, whales are found to be hurt and killed almost entirely by entanglement in fishing gear or strikes by boats.

Like other sea life, whales are affected by ocean warming and by waters becoming more acidic because of climate change. Kenney and others have said whales are moving into more heavily trafficked waters “because the distribution of their food has changed because of warming waters.”

Kenney became irritated by some in the audience over the contentious topic of incidental takes, which are formal permissions under the federal Marine Mammal Protection Act that allow offshore construction, including oil exploration, to “harass, injure or kill” marine life.

Kenney said Green Oceans deliberately overstates the level of disturbance allowed by incidental takes and implies that developers are allowed to kill animals. He said takes are overwhelmingly a case of animals being bothered by noise and moving away from the work.

“Ninety-nine percent of cases, the animals are disturbed, and 1% are a temporary injury,” Kenney said. “There is zero evidence of whales being hurt or killed by wind farms … When you have a dead whale on a beach and you say it was because of wind farms, it makes as much sense as saying it was a death ray from UFOs.”

Kenney also said using the word “seismic” to describe seafloor exploration for wind farms, which wind farm opponents claim may be harming marine mammals, is “a complete lie.” He said that technology is used for oil and gas exploration.

Kenney and other marine scientists from URI and elsewhere support offshore wind because they see global warming and climate change as a far greater threat to the health of ocean life than wind farm construction.

“Lobster fishing is killing whales,” Kenney said. “Why are you people not demanding the end of lobster fishing?”

The subject of impacts on marine life always brings up the sensitive topic of Cox’s Ledge, an important breeding ground for cod off the southern New England coast that is partly occupied by wind turbines. Hittinger offered a long history of negotiations for seafloor leases. He said a federal lease area was subdivided after it was initially granted, leaving only Cox’s Ledge for use by the now-operating South Fork wind farm.

Overall, Hittinger said, negotiations with the fishing community went fairly well leading up to construction of the Block Island Wind Farm because the planning was done mainly with state officials. Hittinger said the fishermen felt their needs and wisdom were taken into account.

He said that changed with Revolution Wind, when much of the negotiation was done with federal officials from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. “We said, ‘We have answers; we have alternatives we want you to look at,’ but we were ignored. Someone had made a decision that these facilities would be constructed no matter the cost, at a rate that served the developers,” Hittinger said.

Members of the audience tried and ultimately failed to get clear answers from the panel about plans for decommissioning the wind farms at the end of their 25- to 30-year life spans, and also about the comparative cost of wind-powered electricity for an ordinary homeowner.

Kearns, of the Office of Energy Resources, said repeatedly that his office had no involvement in decommissioning planning, that it resides entirely with the Coastal Resources Management Council, the regulatory agency that oversees Rhode Island’s 420 miles of coastline.

A bearded man in the audience asked, “Shouldn’t these plans be in place at the start of the process? Shouldn’t the process be clear to the citizens of Rhode Island?”

Asked about pricing of wind-powered electricity when it finally reaches customers, Kearns said it was impossible to simply say how much wind power would cost because of the variability of natural gas prices and the mix of power sources that go into the grid.

“The cost of electricity depends on the resources mix we acquire over a long period of time,” Kearns said. The price of wind power is locked into 20-year contracts, but natural gas “is a spot market,” Kearns said. “It is not an apples-to-apples comparison.”

Jedele extended the topic of pricing of wind electricity to the wider topic of the costs of generating power. She said the old Brayton Point coal-fired power plant — now offline — in Somerset, Mass., sucked up 1 billion gallons a day of seawater and returned the heated water to Mount Hope Bay, leading to an 87% decline in the winter flounder population. She said power plant operators have spent “a staggering amount of money” fighting air pollution controls.

“People have been taken advantage of by the energy industry for a long time,” she said.

Jedele was asked about a comment by the federal government during the Revolution Wind permitting process that the project would have no impact on the worldwide carbon load.

“Everything we do about climate change has to be done at the local level first, and we are working to get it right,” Jedele said. “As citizens of the global community, that is the contribution we have to make.”