What is known about the consequences of offshore wind can be summed up in four words straight from the lead federal agency for these projects: “incomplete and unavailable information.”
The frightening truth is that experts have no idea how these 850-foot giants that require the pounding of 2,000-ton hollow steel cylinders, called monopiles, into the seabed will affect whales and other sea life, or even the ocean itself. And that’s even while they expect such projects to have little if any impact on climate change.
Turbines that are in permitting and construction stages along the Atlantic seaboard now would total, if completed, more than a thousand spinning towers in the ocean. But warnings about the potentially disastrous fallouts have been brushed aside.
Case in point: Megan Brunatti, a high-level official at the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection lambasted the proposed wind energy development off the coasts of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia, what’s called the “Central Atlantic” region.
Offshore wind development there, she wrote in a letter to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), could have “potentially catastrophic cumulative impacts” on New Jersey’s surf clam industry, along with adverse effects on blue crabs, scallops, and essential menhaden stocks.
“There is still not an effective methodology or permitting requirement for analyzing cumulative impacts,” wrote Brunatti, a deputy chief of staff at the agency.
Even BOEM acknowledges offshore wind structures will be “visible on military and national security vessels and aircraft radar,” affecting Federal Aviation Administration and Department of Defense operations.
Nobody seems to be heeding these warnings, however. This past summer, as planned, 280,000 acres in the Central Atlantic region were auctioned off on schedule.
That’s not all.
A 2024 National Academies study admitted that vital “knowledge gaps” in our offshore wind experiment include almost everything about “hydrodynamics (water motion) around wind energy turbines.”
In regard to marine life, the authors, all leading experts from top-tier research facilities around the country, said those unknowns may harm sea creatures from the smallest to the largest, as turbine-altered “waves, tides, and currents” can disrupt zooplankton, the tiny animals giant whales feed on.
Even a regional administrator at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries division warned government officials that the entire wind-energy area auctioned off last October in the Gulf of Maine “overlaps with critical habitat” designated for the North Atlantic right whale, as well as other perilously endangered marine mammals.
His letter cautioned that the wind turbine area encroaches on habitats that “support deep-sea corals and sponges” along with other “ecologically important” marine areas.
Beyond their potential impacts on sea life, turbines use one of the most potent and persistent greenhouse gases known—sulfur hexafluoride. Once the chemical escapes, it lives on in the atmosphere for thousands of years.
This heat-trapping gas will be used both in the wind turbines and the offshore and onshore substations that the technology requires.
It remains to be seen what the new administration can or will do to slow or stop these projects as promised by then-candidate Trump.
Whatever that might be, there’s no doubt that proponents of offshore wind, as well as powerful labor unions and associations, are looking for ways to keep these projects spinning along.
Under the law, construction of these edifices may “torment, “injure,” and “disturb” marine mammals—harm that is shockingly allowed as long as official “harassment authorizations” are issued. This applies even to species on the brink of extinction such as the North Atlantic right whale.
Environmental threats aside, construction has resumed at Vineyard Wind, offshore of idyllic Martha’s Vineyard. There, a 70-ton turbine blade—the length of a football field—broke off last July, scattering sharp shards of debris in the ocean and washing up on Massachusetts and Rhode Island beaches.
Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind has so far installed 78 monopiles for its planned 176 turbines. Revolution Wind continues construction offshore from Connecticut and Rhode Island.
Atlantic Shores, which will be visible from the famed New Jersey beaches, just received the final approvals for its “south” project, 8.7 miles offshore of Atlantic City, which will comprise around half of the 200 turbines expected to blanket a swath of the South Jersey coast.
At this point, the United States government has auctioned off thirty-two wind energy leases in the outer continental shelf from Maine to North Carolina, representing over three million acres of seabed. They have been bought by mostly foreign interests aided with billions of U.S. dollars in subsidies and tax credits.
But paradoxically federal officials have stated, “U.S. offshore wind projects would by themselves probably have a limited impact on global emissions and climate change.”
Despite all the unknowns surrounding practically every aspect of offshore wind, this environmental Titanic has continued to proceed at full throttle.
Linda Bonvie is a South Jersey-based health and environmental journalist and co-author of A Consumer’s Guide to Toxic Food Additives. She has been reporting extensively on offshore wind since 2023.
