Wind power a factor in sea plan for East Coast

PROVIDENCE—The Obama administration must juggle competing interests surrounding offshore wind farms proposed for the East Coast as it decides how the nation’s ocean waters can be used, officials said Thursday.

Wind power was among several concerns Obama’s Ocean Policy Task Force heard during a public meeting in Providence, its only stop on the wind-rich East Coast. The meeting came a week after the task force recommended creating a National Ocean Council to coordinate and hold accountable a hodgepodge of federal agencies responsible for conservation and marine planning.

The task force’s next job is figuring out what uses the country should allow in its waters and where. Three states - Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Maine - are already creating their own management
plans, in part to decide where offshore wind turbines could be placed.

“Offshore of the northeastern states is the most wind-rich area of the country,“ said Melville Cote Jr., manager of the ocean and coastal protection unit of the New England region of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Speakers who addressed the task force repeatedly asked the group to keep local concerns in mind when considering ocean uses.

No offshore wind farms have been constructed in the United States, but projects have been proposed in waters off states including Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Delaware and New Jersey.

Peter Mandelstam, president of Bluewater Wind LLC, said wind projects that are in development should be allowed to proceed while the task force simultaneously works out its rules for the use of
coastal and ocean waters.

The eastern market offers natural advantages for the wind power industry, including a long, shallow coastal shelf that makes building wind turbines cheaper and easier than in deeper waters, said Mandelstam, who serves as chairman of the American Wind Energy Association’s Offshore Wind Working Group.

Those wind turbines would also serve a market that already faces some of the highest electricity prices in the country because of its reliance on fossil fuels.

When setting rules on wind turbines, the task force should also consider the needs of passenger vessels, said Beth Gedney, director of safety, security and risk management for the Passenger Vessel
Association. Gedney said more attention should have been paid to the needs of ferries shuttling passengers to Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket as regulators considered a plan to build 130 turbines in
Nantucket Sound in Massachusetts.