1,500 Wind Turbines. 2,700 Square Miles. Offshore Wind Farm Race Begins in the Atlantic Ocean – NBC10 Philadelphia

Off the coast of New Jersey these days, surveillance vessels hired by European energy companies are taking measurements of the ocean depths, and underwater research drones are analyzing water temperatures to accumulate data on the Mid-Atlantic “Cold Pool.”

Onshore in places like the Port of Paulsboro along the Delaware River south of Camden and Philadelphia, labor unions, port officials and politicians are angling for new marine terminals to build and ship off massive steel monopiles.

And in weekly board meetings, state-appointed officials in charge of the Garden State’s public utilities are discussing massive overhauls to the power grid and many miles of new transmission lines.

Billions of dollars will be invested in the next several years — at sea and on land — to erect hundreds of wind turbines miles from the coast in order to bring New Jersey 7,500 megawatts of renewable energy. That’s enough to power half of the state’s 1.5 million homes.

Eight other states along the Eastern Seaboard of the United States have embarked on similar endeavors, preparing for the arrival of a new era in American energy.

“Wind energy is going to be real. It’s just a question of how much,” EnvironmentNJ executive director Doug O’Malley said. “Flooding down the shore is real. Our number one priority is how our coastal communities are going to be a generation from now. Who knows if we’re here in 2050? We need to study this as much as possible, but also understand we need to look at the full picture of climate change.”

Offshore Wind Farms: The Lease Areas and Developers

Seventeen federally leased areas are off the coasts of eight U.S. states. Click on each lease site to see how many turbines are expected or estimated, to which developer they belong and how much power will be generated. Turbine totals are either based on developers’ proposals or estimated using power generated by the largest turbine currently on the market.

Dire predictions of climate change and how to most quickly pivot to clean energy have fueled the embrace of offshore wind. And while most stakeholders seem on board with the nearly Eiffel Tower-sized turbines, the fishing industry remains a holdout. Meanwhile, the cumulative effect of so many turbines spread across the Mid-Atlantic Bight remains unknown. The bight stretches from the Outer Banks of North Carolina to the Gulf of Maine.

Only seven wind turbines currently rotate in American waters, but more than 1,500 are in planning or development stages from North Carolina to Massachusetts, according to an NBC10 Philadelphia analysis of the federally leased areas and the 19 projects currently in development. The analysis used data from federal and state agencies as well as individual project proposals. Some proposals have cited specifically how many turbines will be built. For others, an estimate was made using the megawatts approved for a project divided by the energy generated by the most powerful turbines on the market. Currently, General Electric is able to construct a 12-megawatt giant called the Haliede X that can power a single-family home for two days with just a single rotation of its blades.

The turbines will occupy areas of the continental shelf encompassing 2,722 square miles — larger than the state of Delaware — and most energy experts believe the ones currently in planning stage are only the first wave.

“We’re talking about a huge amount of offshore resources,” Theodore Paradise, senior vice president of transmission engineering firm Anbaric, said. “We’re talking about massively more than these numbers. (States are) making what feels very big in procurement targets.”

Several developers, all European, have submitted construction proposals to the federal government to build out wind farms by the late 2020s. None have been approved yet, even though the first few have sat in a queue at the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management since 2018.

The first farm in the federal queue, Vineyard Wind off Massachusetts, was given its final environmental impact study by BOEM this month, and industry leaders now believe the federal permitting process will pick up under President Joe Biden.

The first wave of offshore wind farms are being considered for the Mid-Atlantic between North Carolina and Massachusetts. Advocates are pushing for hundreds of the nearly Eiffel Tower-sized turbines by 2030. Here’s why they are considered key to America’s energy future.

“The United States is poised to become a global clean energy leader,” U.S. Interior Department Assistant Secretary Laura Daniel Davis said in announcing Vineyard Wind’s environmental approval on March 8. “To realize the full environmental and economic benefits of offshore wind, we must work together to ensure all potential development is advanced with robust stakeholder outreach and scientific integrity.”

Vineyard estimates turbines could begin powering Massachusetts homes in mid-2024, according to its most recent timeline presented to BOEM.

Politicians, environmentalists and European companies have invested interest in the plans. Big issues still to confront include lucrative North Atlantic fishing concerns; ecological effects on what is known as the Mid-Atlantic Bight’s “Cold Pool”; and the fundamental remaking of power grids that bring the electricity into homes and businesses of 100 million Americans.

Rising Heights of Offshore Wind Turbines

Wind turbines in the ocean are much bigger than the on-land versions that dominate the landscape in places like the American Midwest. Here is how the largest turbine on the market, General Electric’s 12MW Haliede X, compares in size to some well-known structures.

What is the Mid-Atlantic Bight’s ‘Cold Pool’? How Would 1,000s of Turbines Affect It?

Every year off the coast of the eastern United States, from Cape Hatteras in North Carolina to Cape Cod in Massachusetts, forms a unique oceanographic feature called “the Cold Pool.”

It’s a layering of water temperatures that makes for breathtakingly cold water near the ocean floor and much warmer water near the surface and beaches. The effect is called stratification, and it is created each spring, peaks each summer and mixes up once again each fall.

The stark difference in water temperature during the late spring and summer months makes it one of Earth’s unique marine ecosystems. It gives the continental shelf off the northeastern United States a diversity of fauna that has persisted for centuries. Fishermen and scientists alike credit the Cold Pool with powering the renowned fisheries of New England, New Jersey and Maryland.

No one knows the extent to which thousands of wind turbines would have on the stratification process, or if the twirling horizon-scrapers will affect the Cold Pool at all.

SCEMFIS: The Mid-Atlantic Cold Pool from Stove Boat on Vimeo.

For much of the last decade, offshore wind advocates analyzed the potential — and ecological effects — of the renewable energy at the individual turbine level and at the farm level.

A third way of looking at the new energy source has only recently emerged.

“The third level is, what happens if you have 10 of these wind facilities that are near each other?” said Josh Kohut, a marine biologist at Rutgers University’s Center for Ocean Observing Leadership.

Kohut and his colleagues at RU COOL released a research paper in late January that looked for potential effects on the Cold Pool through the lens of European offshore wind projects.

“The scale of the impact of these wind farms has the potential to alter the unique and delicate oceanographic conditions along the expansive Atlantic continental shelf,'” the report summary reads.

Northern Europe, from Scotland to Germany, has a two-decade head start on the United States in the offshore wind realm. More than 5,000 turbines currently operate off the coasts of eight countries there, pumping 25 gigawatts of energy into power grids.

The Rutgers team studied the continent’s 110 farms, looking for similar ecological areas to compare with the Mid-Atlantic Bight and its Cold Pool.

Two places, in particular, stood out: the Irish Sea off Scotland and the German Bight in the North Sea.

But the report found that differences in the stratification of the European bodies of water make the research conducted off the other continent difficult to directly compare with the Mid-Atlantic Bight.

[To read the FULL REPORT by Kohut and his colleagues, CLICK HERE.]

“The potential for these multiple wind energy arrays to alter oceanographic processes, and the biological systems that rely on them is possible,” the report summary said. “However, a great deal of uncertainty remains about the nature and scale of these interactions.”

The Rutgers team concluded more data and analysis is needed. Kohut said technology makes it possible to get a better sense of the cumulative effect of the Cold Pool in the next couple years.

He said his team continues looking at European wind farms’ effects on ocean stratification there while also deploying an underwater drone off of the New Jersey coast to get data from the Cold Pool.

“Our objective is to get the latest and best science available to the people making these decisions,” Kohut said.

The European study was funded by the Science Center for Marine Fisheries, a group with fishing industry affiliations that seeks to promote sustainable fisheries.

“We didn’t know the scale and depth and rate at which wind mills would develop,” SCEMFIS chairman Greg DiDomenico, of Cape May, N.J.-based Lund Fisheries, said in an interview. “It’s now at a tremendous pace. We have not heard what will be the impact of that type of development on the Mid-Atlantic ecosystem. And if in fact, it’s wind mills at any cost, then someone needs to tell us that.”

O’Malley, the executive director of EnvironmentNJ, which advocates for environmental issues in the Garden State, said more studies on the…