By cfact
By David Wojick
Empire wind is a large New York offshore wind project that is ready to start building. The Trump administration stopped it about a month ago, but did not shot it down after the president concluded an informal contract with Governor Hochul to collect New York's ban on new gas pipelines from Pennsylvania.
Empire is about to drive the huge steel monopile that hold the turbine towers, but a new fold hit the fan and set the stage for a massive confrontation. A group that protests against the project has submitted a federal action that questions its approval. In contrast to previous complaints, this also makes a new argument for some of the usual. It questions the authorized harassment of the NOAA fishing due to a large number of an endangered dolphin.
The problem is the authorization boundaries of the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA), which are exceeded by an enormous lead. This looks like a strong case on paper, so that the court uses the project.
Empire Wind has added a bit of drama and has set one of the largest crane ships/boots/boots/things that hold and drive the monopiles of the monster, which are the source of the objections to harassment. It is what is referred to as the “half-submar”, which means that it is lowered to get the stability for its huge crane to lift and keep things over the water without turning around.
The official name of this animal is the Semi-Submersible Crane-Ship (SSCV) Thialf, and you can read here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/scv_thialf. Before you go to work, it puts a 48 foot in the water. It then has an incredible lifting capacity of 14,000 tons.
Note that there are already two other offshore wind stacking driving projects, which raises the problem of cumulative effects, especially in the highly wandering and desperately endangered North Atlantic law. One is Revolution Wind Off Rhode Island, which is not that far away. The other is Dominion's big project before Virginia, one of the largest wind devices in the world.
The lawsuit is Save Long Beach Island, Inc. (Save LBI), which protects our coast Long Island-New York and Miss Belmar Whale Whale Company from Save the Ost Coast. You can read about the suit here: https://www.savelbi.org/press-releases.
The basic problem is pretty simple. According to MMPA, NOAA authorizes the harassment by pile movement of a certain number of living beings of each protected species, from whales to seals. This is referred to as a random approval, in which randomly means that this is not the purpose of the project. It is certainly not one of the harassed animals that can be in the tens of thousands.
For an offshore wind construction project, the approval is permitted for a period of five years with annual permits. According to the MMPA, these permits are limited to a “small” part of the species population. Noaa interprets up to 30%, which is questionable in itself.
According to the Save LBI, the empire -winding autorization for one dolphin type is 30% per year and overall like the entire population. This says that you violate the MMPA standard “Small Take”, and that is the central problem before the court. Sounds right for me.
I have to be surprised by the huge Dominion project, in which more than 20,000 dolphin species are molested. That is certainly not small.
This case is of great interest to me, since I have been overwriting excessive harassment permits for some time and has written about the harassment of Wal. See here: https://www.cfact.org/2024/30/my-41-wind-threet-whales-articles-track-ubline-decception/.
Two years ago, I reported the NOAA fishing for cumulative harassment of the North Atlantic right wing, which exceeded over 200% of the population: https://www.cfact.org/2023/24/noaaa-propose-208-of-vanishing-light-light-whales/whales/. This cumulative number is now much higher.
So this is the Dramatic Empire Wind Showdown. A small dolphin in court compared to the second largest crane ship in the world at sea that runs over a giant heap. Stay on CFACT while this drama unfolds.
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