Wind Industry Is Killing Sea Life On East Coast, Fishermen Say

Biden administration is covering up the extent of the damage and ignoring warnings from top government biologists 

Over the last three years, we have been documenting the ecological catastrophequietly unfolding on the East Coast. With the support of the US government, the wind industry is killing whales and other sea life. If nothing changes, the wind industry will make the North Atlantic right whale go extinct.

It turns out the situation was even worse than we had imagined. Over the last six months, investigative reporter Donna Andersen interviewed dozens of fishermen, government officials, and scientists and has uncovered a scandal in plain sight: the wind industry is destroying the fishing industry.

People are taking notice. Just today, the New York Times published an article documenting growing resistance by the fishing industry.

Why now? In part because of the recent collapse of a giant wind turbine blade off the coast of Massachusetts, which scattered jagged pieces of fiberglass along the beaches of Nantucket, threatening the boats of fishermen and local tourists.

Please take a moment to read Donna’s outstanding investigation below!

— Michael Shellenberger

When the offshore wind developers came to his ocean, James “Ace” Auteri, a commercial fisherman for 50 years, did his best to cooperate.

Auteri is a pot fisherman. He caught sea bass in pots eight miles southwest of his home port of Montauk, New York. Thirty miles to the east, near Block Island, Rhode Island, he caught lobsters.

The South Fork Wind Farm, with 12 turbines located 19 miles southeast of Block Island, was completed on Mar. 24. Now electric power flows through a high-voltage export cable for 66 miles and comes ashore in East Hampton, New York.

The cable passes right through both of Auteri’s longtime fishing grounds.

So far this year, the sea bass fishing is okay. But lobsters? “There are no signs of life at all,” Auteri said.

Commercial fishermen all around Block Island are telling similar stories. Ever since the wind farms came to the ocean, lobsters are hard to find. Formerly productive scallop beds are dead. Cod have disappeared.

Vineyard Wind’s broken wind turbine, which scattered fiberglass across ocean and beaches.

South Fork Wind is owned by Orsted, the Danish energy giant. Orsted has a Marine Affairs team “committed to helping fishermen and other mariners thrive in and around our offshore wind farms,” according to its website.

It doesn’t seem that way to Ace Auteri.

“Last year they were supposed to be done by June with the trenching,” he said. “I told them I had to get gear in by the end of July. They tore up all the bottom, and when I put gear in, there were no lobsters.”

Orsted used a 50-foot-wide underwater plow to dig a trench for the export cable, Auteri said. Then they used big cranes to move the boulders.

Auteri ironically observed that for years, the government has regulated local fishermen to save the lobsters. “All the things they told us we had to do, and then they let them come in and tear up the lobster grounds,” he said.

James “Ace” Auteri.

Auteri typically starts lobster fishing on April 1. “By the middle of July, I caught 1,000 pounds. I should have caught 5,000 pounds,” he said.

“We count on a lot of lobsters being in a certain spot at a certain time,” Auteri explained. “Usually during the spring, we catch groundskeepers — lobsters that have been there all winter. A big percentage are of legal size. Then we’re fishing for lobsters that aren’t resident — they move out from Block Island and move in from offshore.

“We used to catch a dark, shiny lobster around Block Island, but there are no lobsters. I can’t say if it’s windmills or warming, but we catch nothing by the windmills anymore.”

Ace Auteri’s story illustrates the experiences of commercial fishermen all over southeastern New England. The windmills have arrived, and the catch is down. They say the federal government, state governments and offshore wind developers promised to listen to them, the people who worked the ocean for generations. Instead, they say, their concerns and objections were overruled. Fishermen are already reporting the negative effects of an industrialized ocean. They fear their industry will not survive the wind turbines.

Biden’s plan to expand offshore wind

Map of planned industrial wind projects off the East Coast

A week after he took office in 2021, President Joe Biden issued Executive Order 14008, which put climate change at the center of United States policy and authorized a huge expansion of the offshore wind industry.

On March 29, 2021, the administration set a goal of deploying 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030. The primary objectives were to spur capital investment and create union jobs with $3 billion in offshore wind funding and $230 million for port infrastructure. Only $1 million was allocated for studying the impact of offshore wind on fishing and coastal communities.

“It will generate enough power to meet the demand of more than 10 million American homes for a year, and avoid 78 million metric tons of CO2 emissions,” the administration said.

Individual states set ambitious goals of their own. Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York wants 9,000 megawatts of offshore wind by 2035. Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey wants 11,000 megawatts by 2040. Rhode Island mandated net-zero economy-wide emissions by 2050.

The Inflation Reduction Act, which Biden signed into law on August 16, 2022, allows offshore wind developers to claim 30% to 40% of their investments as tax credits for projects that begin construction before January 1, 2026.

With all these government incentives, the pace of offshore wind development has been fast and furious.

In the Atlantic Ocean between Block Island and Martha’s Vineyard, wind farms are planned to be stacked up like massive dominoes. They are all owned by foreign companies.

Adjacent to South Fork Wind, Revolution Wind, with 65 turbines, is now under construction. Next to that, Sunrise Wind, with up to 84 turbines, has received final approval. Next to that, Bay State Wind is seeking permits for up to 110 turbines. Next to that, Vineyard Wind 1 will have 62 turbines, 10 of which started delivering power to Massachusetts. Next to that, construction plans for New England Wind 1 and 2, with up to 129 turbines, have been approved.

These and other nearby wind farms cover an area of 1,400 square miles, bigger than the entire state of Rhode Island. All of it is prime fishing ground.

“Eight years ago, my biggest fear was, okay. Wait a minute. You're putting all of these things in the most productive areas of the ocean,” said Bonnie Brady, executive director of the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association in Montauk. “Why, how do I know this? Because that's where fishermen go to fish.”

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) is the federal agency leading the charge. “BOEM’s mission is to regulate offshore renewable energy development activities in an environmentally responsible way,” the agency declares on its website.

BOEM requires voluminous environmental impact statements for all wind developments. The agency holds public meetings with stakeholders, including commercial fishermen. To the fishermen and community groups who have participated, however, the meetings are all for show.

“Anytime BOEM does their presentations, and they're saying, we go through this process, we get stakeholder input and we la, la, la — no, they don't,” said Meghan Lapp, fisheries liaison for Seafreeze Ltd., a Rhode Island commercial fishing company. “They get the stakeholder input. Then they kick it to the curb and they move on. That’s what they do.”

Public News asked BOEM to comment on the fishermen’s perspective that they were being ignored. The agency did not respond.

Wind turbines As Tall As The Chrysler Building

Where Ace Auteri fishes, the ocean floor has areas of rock, which fishermen call “hardbottom,” and areas of sand, called softbottom. Lobsters live in the hardbottom. That’s where the South Fork Wind Farm developers decided to lay their high-voltage export cable.

“They had to go down some of the best bottom there is,” Auteri said. “They could have gone a half-mile to the south and laid the cable on open bottom. A half-mile to the south it’s sand.”

The export cable is up to 12 inches in diameter, according to South Fork Wind. It connects the onshore power grid to the wind turbines.

“They turned on the cable and there were no lobsters,” Auteri said.

Like all windmills planned for the East Coast, South Fork Wind turbines are built with monopile foundations. These are steel pipes approximately 300 feet long and 34 feet in diameter. They are pounded up to 150 feet into the sea floor and extend up above the water line.

Attached to the monopile foundation is another massive pipe, the wind turbine tower. At the top of the tower is the nacelle, which houses the wind turbine machinery. The turning blades are attached to the nacelle.

At South Fork, each wind turbine stands up to 840 feet above the surface of the Atlantic Ocean. Other wind turbines will be even taller. Off the coast of New Jersey, the Atlantic Shores wind farm plans 195 turbines. They will rise 1,047 feet above the sea — as tall as the Chrysler Building.

Many wind turbines include “scour protection” to stabilize them — huge piles of rocks around the monopile foundations. Atlantic Shores estimated that the scour fields will extend 269 feet in diameter around each monopile. This means there will be an 8-foot-tall pile of rocks the size of a football field at the base of each wind turbine.

The turbines are installed in a grid pattern, one nautical mile apart. High voltage cables are buried in trenches between the wind turbines. The trenches are four to six feet deep — except where digging is too difficult. There, cables are protected by concrete “mattresses.”

All of these unnatural structures create what fishermen call “hangs” — places where their gear can get caught. A net or tow line caught on a hang has the potential to flip a boat.

Before anything is built, BOEM issues draft and then final environmental impact statements The final environmental impact statement for Vineyard Wind was issued in March 2021. In Appendix A of the document, BOEM wrote that the wind farm, referred to as the “proposed action,” would have “negligible impacts on greenhouse gas emissions.”

BOEM wrote, “Overall, it is anticipated that there would be no collective impact on global warming as a result of offshore wind projects, including the Proposed Action alone, though they may beneficially contribute to a broader combination of actions to reduce future impacts from climate change.”

Public News asked BOEM to clarify what offshore wind development will do to reduce climate change. The agency did not respond.

Built On the Most Productive Fishing Habitat

“Anytime BOEM does their presentations, and they're saying, we go through this process, we get stakeholder input, and we la, la, la — no, they don't,” said Meghan Lapp. “They get the stakeholder input. Then they kick it to the curb and they move on.”

Ace Auteri is not seeing lobsters at all stages of development like he did in the past. He is not seeing eggers — female lobsters with eggs. He’s not seeing shedders — lobsters that have shed their shells so they can grow new, larger ones. He’s not seeing shorts — juvenile lobsters that are illegal to keep.

The offshore wind farms between Block Island and Martha’s Vineyard are built on top of and around a geological formation called Cox Ledge. The ancient rocks are spawning grounds and crucial habitat for multiple species of fish, crustaceans and invertebrates. Building there is like building on a coral reef.

BOEM issues the final permits for wind farm construction, but must consult with other agencies, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), its subsidiary, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), and state environmental regulators.

In October 2021, NMFS expressed serious concerns to BOEM about building the South Fork Wind Farm on Cox Ledge. “This project has a high risk of population-level impacts on Southern New England Atlantic cod,” the agency wrote.

“Population-level impacts” is code for extinction.

Public News asked NOAA about the status of the cod. “The stock began a significant decline in the late 1990s and has been at historically low levels since the mid-2000s, with little change in condition over that time,” said Kate Silverstein of NOAA Fisheries Public Affairs. “We remain concerned about a number of factors that may be driving this decline.”

The Block Island and South Fork wind farms are now generating power, and others are under construction. Local fishermen are seeing changes in the fisheries.

Chris Brown, a commercial fisherman based in Port Judith, Rhode Island, has caught codfish, flounder, herring, squid, fluke and other species from the waters around Block Island for decades. After the Block Island Wind Farm began operations in December 2016, many of the fish disappeared.

“The year that the towers were simply vertical structures and were not producing electricity, we caught significant amounts of codfish — 20,000 to 30,000 pounds — fishing around the base of the turbines and a couple of miles away,” he said. “After they hit the switch, I caught less than 100 pounds the following year.”

For 22 years, Kevin Debbis fished for scallops off of Montauk and Block Island — the same general area as Ace Auteri, the lobsterman. In February 2022, his dredge pulled up scallops with their shells wide open. They were “clappers,” scallops that had recently died.

“I took them to a lab,” Debbis said. “They told me that the scallops I brought them were healthy.”

The scallops weren’t diseased, so why were they dead? Debbis said scallops have suffered ever since the offshore wind developers did their survey work in the area.

“Either the food supply got hurt or the scallops were hurt,” Debbis said. “Or the seismic survey may have done harm.”

In preparation for installing the towering wind turbines and miles of cables, offshore wind companies send vessels to map the ocean floor. They blast seabed with seismic acoustical pulses — in other words, noise. It’s as loud as an underwater rock concert.

Michael Marchetti, a scalloper based in Port Judith, Rhode Island, said that immediately after the seismic surveys, his catch dropped off significantly.

He fishes in the area of the South Fork wind farm. “The year before the survey I did well with scallops,” Marchetti said. “Then we had a die-off; something happened in those areas. It’s tough to pinpoint exactly what happened, but nothing has returned.”

One day last spring, while looking for a place to fish, Marchetti caught only two sickly scallops.

Marchetti doesn’t want to see any more wind turbines installed in the ocean but is also cautious about placing blame. Maybe there are environmental factors, Marchetti said, such as salinity or water temperature. But he does recognize the obvious:

“Everywhere the survey boats went, everything went to hell.”

Public News asked NOAA to comment on the dead scallops and declining catches. “Specific to commercial fishing, understanding the possible effects and impacts of offshore wind energy on fishery catches and fishery species is a research gap identified by NOAA Fisheries and our collaborators,” Silverstein said.

Low-Frequency Noise Harms Marine Life

Scene from “Thrown To The Wind,” which exposed illegally high noise, which causes whale deaths.

Ever since the federal and state governments have been promoting offshore wind, fishing industry representatives have been warning of dire effects on fisheries.

Seafreeze Ltd. employs high-capacity freezer trawlers, F/V Relentless and F/V Persistence, to fish for squid, mackerel, herring, butterfish and other species. Meghan Lapp, the fisheries liaison, testified at a congressional field hearing sponsored by Congressman Jeff Van Drew on Aug. 13. She has filed multiple comments in the Federal Register explaining how offshore wind jeopardizes the fish they harvest.

Lapp said that the cumulative effect of hundreds of wind turbines in one lease area is unknown because such a massive wind farm complex has never been built anywhere in the world.

“What we do know is that different species do not like the low-frequency noise. Codfish do not like it,” Lapp said.

“We do know that with the Block Island Wind Farm, when they turned it on and it began to produce both the noise and the electromagnetic fields from the cables, lobsters left the area. People who used to fish there for lobsters don't fish there anymore.

Research has shown that loud noise, such as the intense acoustical blasts of seismic surveys, the ominous pounding of huge jackhammers violently shoving monopiles into the ocean floor, and the continuous drone of operating wind turbines, do affect marine mammals, fish, and invertebrates.

A study published in 2019 by the University of Tasmania in Australia found that lobsters exposed to seismic air gun noise lost their ability to extend their tails and took twice as long to right themselves when placed on their backs.

In 2017, the same research team found that scallops exposed to the noise exhibited a “flinch” response and compromised biological functions. Repeated exposure to noise intensified the damage, and scallops suffered increased mortality in the 120 days following the experiments.

But with offshore wind development, no one is considering the impact of the high-intensity seismic surveys on sea creatures like these.

The National Environmental Policy Act requires BOEM to evaluate the potential environmental impacts of wind turbine installation during all stages of development. To meet this obligation for the Block Island Wind Farm, BOEM has been gathering data about the seafloor during the construction and operation of its five wind turbines.

Data collection started as the wind turbine foundations were being installed into the seabed, between July 26 and October 26, 2015, according to BOEM’s report. However, sonar survey vessels were around Block Island earlier, between January and September of 2015. Therefore, any impact of the seismic surveys on lobsters, scallops or other marine life was not measured.

Public News asked BOEM why no data is being collected before, during and after the seismic surveys. The agency did not respond.

The same situation occurred with the South Fork Wind Farm.

The Commercial Fisheries Research Foundation (CFRF) conducts research and supports education to achieve sustainable fisheries. CFRF is monitoring fisheries pre-construction, during construction and post-construction at the South Fork, Revolution and Sunrise wind farms.

Its beam trawl survey for South Fork collects information on benthic species. These are creatures that live on the seafloor, like scallops, starfish and sponges. For the past two years, the survey reports noted a lack of scallops in the South Fork Wind Farm area.

The survey is planned to last for six years. “What we’re seeing so far is not conclusive,” said David Bethoney, CFRF executive director. “Anecdotally, I can tell you that we did see during the construction some dips in the fish species, but it's hard to tell if that is the construction itself, or if it's broader changes.”

CFRF started collecting data in the South Fork Wind Farm and an environmentally similar control area in October 2020, before the turbines were installed. The monitoring continued through 2023, during construction. Now, CFRF is collecting data during the wind farm’s operation.

However, seismic sonar survey boats worked the area three years earlier, between August and December of 2017. No data were collected while the ocean was in its natural state, before the offshore wind seismic sonar surveys.

“Everything that we're doing now does not account for those surveys as an impact,” Bethoney said. “To me, that's something that needs to be looked at. Do they have an impact? If they do, then they change our baseline before we even can collect it.”

When there’s noise, scallops try to flee. Scallops clap their shells, forcing a jet of water past the shell hinge, propelling the animal forward. But swimming comes at a cost.

“They keep using up energy reacting to the sound, and they don’t have energy to do things like eat and reproduce,” Bethoney said. “I think there could be an issue. There's definitely mechanisms for sound like this to impact animals.”

Offshore wind developers are obligated to comply with protocols to protect whales, marine mammals, turtles and other species from excessive noise, but Bethoney doesn’t know of any protections for animals like lobsters, scallops or squid.

“This is something that the fishermen have brought up many times. We want to do research around these impacts. But it's like almost too late.”

Public News asked BOEM if there were any protocols to protect these animals. The agency did not respond.

Fishermen Object, Officials Approve Anyway

Bonnie Brady, executive director of the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association in Montauk

Fishermen like Ace Auteri have a deep understanding of the living ocean and are familiar with research about the creatures who live there. Everyday fishermen and their trade associations have expressed serious concerns to both the federal and state governments — so far, to no avail.

BOEM issues the final approvals for ocean wind farms. First, however, states must determine that the projects are consistent with their own environmental laws. This is called a “consistency review.”

Rhode Island has comprehensive regulations for coastal development, called the Ocean Special Area Management Plan (Ocean SAMP). Members of the Rhode Island Fisherman’s Advisory Board put countless hours of work into developing the plan and were proud of their contributions.

Mike Marchetti, the scalloper, was a member of the Fisherman’s Advisory Board. But when the big companies wanted permits for their wind farms, the Ocean SAMP, he said, was “minimally helpful at best.”

“It was like banging our heads against a wall. Not good,” Marchetti said. “There was a lot of influence peddling, and everything was going through the governor’s office. Ours was a dog and pony show, and we felt we were legitimizing a process, checking a box rather than making a difference.

“At the end of the day, this is just a money transfer of our tax dollars to unions and foreign corporations,” Marchetti said. “It’s generating a lot of union work at the expense of blue-collar guys like us. We’re getting tossed to the wolves and these guys are moving in.”

Despite the fishermen’s concerns and objections, the wind farm projects were approved.

“The root of the problem is that BOEM has been given carte blanche to sell the ocean floor by presidential order,” Marchetti said. “Any local rules get smoothed over to make it happen. There’s lots of money showing up, and all of a sudden, things happen.

“They’ve been given the presidential policy. We’re just speed bumps in the freakin’ way.”

In August 2023, all nine members of the Fisherman’s Advisory Board resigned. “The Ocean SAMP process has been reduced to mere political theater, to which we refuse to lend any further credence by our presence,” they wrote.

Chris Brown, who saw his haul of codfish dwindle to practically nothing after the Block Island Wind Farm was activated, was also a member of the board. He said that the headlong rush to develop offshore wind “has assaulted democracy in this country.”

“Joe Biden, who I voted for, is quick to point out autocratic behavior in people around him,” Brown said. “This is a presidential act. There was not a single congressman that got to vote about wind farms. This is not a function of science. This is a function of politics being used as a proxy for science.”

Brown pointed out that fish is a renewable resource with the ability to feed millions of people, and commercial fishing it is the greatest provider of protein per gallon of fuel in the nation. Fishermen work under the Magnuson-Stevens Act, which is the gold standard for fisheries management.

“We have brought back more stocks from the edge of depletion,” Brown said. “We have right sized the fleet. We have respected the habitat of these things; we understand more and more every year; and we do more and more to protect our oceans and fisheries; all for a president to run roughshod over the pillars of our environmental conscience.”

True Stewards Of The Ocean

Fishermen and local interest groups are fighting back. Chris Brown is among 35 plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the federal government spearheaded by Green Oceans, a Rhode Island grassroots organization dedicated to protecting the ocean.

The suit alleges that the U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers issued permits for the South Fork and Revolution Wind projects on Cox Ledge, despite acknowledging serious irreversible harm and without adequate environmental impact studies.

“Over the last few months there were several back-and-forth filings by Green Oceans plaintiffs and responses by both BOEM and Revolution Wind,” said Lisa Linowes, executive director of the Wind Action Group and a member of the Save Right Whales Coalition, which is also a plaintiff.

The recent Supreme Court decision that overturned the Chevron deference and curtailed the power of federal agencies, Relentless v. Department of Commerce, was initiated by Seafreeze Ltd. It may have an impact on the Green Oceans case.

“We’ll find out how brave the courts are willing to be in listening to challenges to the agencies,” Linowes said.

Fishermen feel betrayed by the federal government, said Bonnie Brady of the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association.

“This is basically our federal government exterminating us without making us take cyanide,” she said. “They are closing down all our fishing grounds by putting turbines on them and cabling on them and juicing the ocean floor, after they've destroyed the structure that was on the ocean floor.

“They don't even have to do another thing, because basically, by taking all the fishable grounds away from us and turning it into a paved steel forest, you're literally destroying the ocean. You’re killing the ocean.

“What I love, though, about this entire cluster is, fishermen are showing themselves to be the true stewards of the ocean. We always were. We've been maligned for 30 years by NGOs — raping the sea, killing Flipper, and so forth.

“Guess what — we're the front line. People need to pay attention to what's happening and stop it.”

“I catch nothing and it’s not their fault”

Fishermen want to stop the wind farms. On Aug. 25, 41 fishing vessels steamed in protest out to Vineyard Wind, where a wind turbine blade fractured, causing fiberglass and foam to cascade into the ocean.

But relief might come too late for Ace Auteri. He’s 71 years old. He started fishing in the 1970s.

Auteri’s business was half sea bass fishing and half lobsters. Not anymore — he has almost no income from lobsters. Last year, Auteri’s income was down 60 percent from the year before. After 50 years, fishing for Auteri is losing financial viability.

“My fuel bills are $300 a day. Bait is $200 to $250 per day. The deck hands work off a percentage.

“I’ve only been able to go out every other week – there’s no life at all. After expenses, I make about $600 divided between the boat and two deck hands.

“I could make that sweeping floors.”

Offshore wind companies have established funds to compensate commercial fishermen for lost gear or income, although the compensation criteria differ by company and by state.

Auteri spent two days preparing a claim for the $40,000 in revenue he lost last year. Orsted has not officially responded, but they did tell him that fishing catches change from year to year, and their wind farm is not responsible for shortfalls.

“I’ve been catching for 50 years,” Auteri said. “Now I catch nothing and it’s not their fault.

“Everything that I predicted would happen has happened. I’m Nostradamus,” he continued. “I went to the meetings. I talked to them. I cooperated. All they did was reassure me that they would take care of me.”

On May 29, Orsted hosted an open house at the Montauk Fish Market about the upcoming Sunrise Wind project. They served coffee and bagels, and all the fishermen were invited. Auteri took the opportunity to ask about his claim.

“They said they’d get back to me, but there’s been no response,” Auteri said.

“They don’t answer our questions. They’re done with us, moved on and left us in their wake. Abandoned us — what’s done is done.”

Orsted did not respond to a request for comment.