Tag Archives: whales

We Need To Rethink Coastal Wind Farms

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I am not going to go into details on the number of dead whales found on the East Coast since exploration for wind farms began. I am going to focus on the more basic problems caused by off-shore wind farms. On Saturday, The Washington Examiner posted an article about some of the problems with the Atlantic Shores Offshore Wind, LLC (Atlantic Shores) project planned for the New Jersey Coast.

The article reports:

While the Biden administration and other environmental activist groups boast that the Atlantic Shores South project, nearly nine years in the making, is another milestone in the country’s harvesting of green energy, a former U.S. Department of Energy engineer raises alarm bells that not only is this project detrimental to tourism, the ocean’s ecosystem, but it will actually raise energy costs to as high as 80% over the next 20 years.

…“Project 1 and Project 2 are expected to generate up to 2,800 megawatts of electricity, enough to power close to one million homes with clean renewable energy,” according to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. 

And while Atlantic Shores South says this project will generate $1.9 billion in economic benefits for the Garden State, an analysis by Edward P. O’Donnell with Whitestrand Consulting found that consumers from residents to commercials to industrial all across the state will see a massive hike in their electric bills. 

The article concludes:

As concerning as it is for Stern to see his electric bills go up, he’s worried about how this green energy project will impact marine animals like whales. 

“The underwater noise from all phases of this, the vessel surveys which use noise devices to characterize the seabed, then the noise from when you pile drive the foundations, and then ultimately the operation of these huge structures create a lot of underwater noise,” Stern said. “We’ve looked at it extensively and we believe it’s going to cause great harm to the whales, to the dolphins, particularly the whales that have to migrate to New Jersey to get where they’re going.”

But according to Stern it gets worse as commercial vessel traffic, military, and fishing boats won’t be allowed in the wind complex.

“So they’re going to be squeezed into these narrow corridors,” Stern said. “And it turns out that the corridors that they’re going to be squeezed into also happens to be a migration corridor for the whales. Now you’re creating, not only a hazard to the whales but a hazard to the vessels.” 

In the Bureau of Ocean of Energy Management’s Environmental Review, the agency acknowledged that the Atlantic Shores South would have a major impact on the North Atlantic White Whale, less than 400 remaining in the wild. 

Stern, who organized Save Long Beach Island in an effort to push back on the project, said there’s also a fear with community members that the windmills, a major eye sore just miles away from the coast, will negatively impact tourism. 

The Long Beach Island Chamber of Commerce said in an email that it was against the project, but did not want to make a comment. 

“What are we doing this for?” Stern said. “People come out and say we have to do this for climate change, but even the agency’s documents say it has a negligible impact on climate change because there is a much bigger dynamic going on there with the rest of the world.”

Stern, along with his comrades in Save Long Island Beach are not giving up and said they will be taking this to court. 

“This is an energy boondoggle,” Stern said. “Unfortunately, it’s also a hazardous boondoggle, and I believe the country will regret this.”

It’s time to re-evaluate.

 

The Price Animals Pay For Green Energy

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On Monday, PJ Media posted an article about the increase in whale deaths offshore near wind farms. The article reminds us that when the Cape Wind Farm was proposed off the coast of Massachusetts, the elites who lived on the coast proposed it. Wind farms were for the little people.

The article reports:

…But there is concern that the surveying for the construction of offshore wind farms may be causing a problem for the whale population. Dead whales are washing up along the shores of New York and New Jersey. Meghan Lapp of Seafreeze fisheries told Tucker Carlson:

I can’t authoritatively say that all of the whales that are washing up are because of offshore wind farms. But what I can tell you is that the seven whales that washed up off New Jersey in the past month have all washed up during intense geotechnical surveying of wind farm leases off of New Jersey. On the East Coast, there has been an unusual mortality event for humpback whales from 2016 until now. The only thing that has changed in the ocean in that time is the fact there have been offshore wind surveys occurring from 2015 until now. Now, magically there are a bunch of humpback whales dying.

The article concludes:

So, coal is bad and deadly. Oil is bad and deadly. Natural gas is bad and deadly. But wind power is awesome! Unless you happen to be a whale. In which case, the process of putting in a wind farm could be bad and deadly.

It is tempting to think that the administration is in bed with the WEF and companies that create wind farms, and that the lobbyists have done their jobs well. And that is a perfectly reasonable speculation since everything must be electric now, lest the planet becomes a smoking cinder before our very eyes. It is equally plausible that the people who are pushing the electric agenda didn’t think things through far enough to consider the possibility that they could kill animals that have been struggling for years in terms of numbers. Or they just didn’t care. But then, being a Leftist means never having to say you’re sorry. Or admit a mistake.

Wind farms are also deadly to birds attempting to fly through them. In January 2121, The American Bird Conservancy reported the following:

The Erickson study reported that 62.5 percent of the birds in their data set were small birds. Taking 62.5 percent of the 681,000 annual mortality estimate calculated above and adjusting this with the 1.6- and 2.7-fold multipliers from the dog search study (and adding the other 37.5 percent of birds back in), this would translate into a total of 936,000 and 1.4 million birds based on the numbers from the two sites. Averaging the two, this would suggest that 1.17 million birds are killed by wind turbines in the United States each year.

When Green Energy Kills Wildlife

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On Monday The Daily Caller posted an article about the impact of ocean wind farms on the sonar capabilities of whales and other marine animals. It is known that wind farms impact radar when they are near airports, so it is not really a surprise that they would have an impact of the navigational systems of marine mammals. This report of the death of a family of whales near a wind farm comes from the United Kingdom.

The article states:

The U.K. coastguard received reports of a minke whale calf that had become separated from its mother Friday evening. By the next afternoon, it had been found dead at the mouth of the River Ore, and its mother washed up near Felixstowe. On Sunday, another dead adult whale surfaced, indicating that an entire family could have been killed.

…“There are studies that show that the sounds created by the operational noise of the turbines create vibrations under that may in fact disorient marine mammals like whales,” Bonnie Brady, director of the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association who regularly discusses the impacts of noise on marine mammals, told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “In the case of what looks like this mother and calf, they go on the wrong path and end up disoriented then beaching themselves. The sound kills.”

Both construction and ordinary operations noises from offshore wind turbines can travel immense distances under water. This harms whales, dolphins, marine mammals and fish that communicate with noises in order to breed. For this reason, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) guidelines show that high noise levels can cause marine mammals like whales and dolphins to go deaf and disrupt their vocal communications.

The acoustic disturbances from constructing wind farms and from the wind farms themselves are harmful to fish and water mammals. Combined with the fact that the wind cannot be depended on to generate electricity 24/7 and a backup fossil fuel energy source is needed for those times when the wind dies down, wind energy is not yet at a point where it makes sense. In America, wind farms are killing some of our most magnificent birds. We need to either improve the wind farm technology or look in another direction for alternative energy sources.