The Power Struggle Behind Rhode Island’s Offshore Wind Farms

Photo illustration: Emily Rietzel/Getty Images.

In 1887, a holiday cottage in Marykirk, Scotland, became the first home to be powered by an electricity-producing wind turbine. The thirty-three-foot-tall wooden structure with four canvas sails, designed and built by renewable energy pioneer James Blyth, spun above the garden with enough speed to generate four evenings’ worth of light and electrify the town’s main street with the excess. But Marykirk turned down his offer, believing that electricity was the devil’s work. The rest of the world, running on cheap coal and oil, was similarly disinterested.

But Blyth saw the potential for wind to generate enough electricity to power everything from lighthouses to homes to factories. The coal supply was finite, but “the wind is proverbially free,” he once wrote, “and is to be had everywhere.” 

It took nearly a century for everyone else to catch up. In 1980, US Windpower installed the world’s first wind farm — twenty turbines built into the shoulder of Crotched Mountain in New Hampshire. Now, almost fifty years later, the East Coast is about to host the world’s largest offshore wind farm, via clusters of individual projects driven into the Outer Continental Shelf from Maine to the Carolinas. The federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the lead regulatory agency, is now overseeing twenty-six commercial lease areas for wind farms in various stages. 

Right now, 60 percent of the electricity in the United States is generated by fossil fuel, compared to 21 percent renewables. Of the latter, wind power accounts for a little over 10 percent, according to the latest data provided by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. But in March 2021, President Joe Biden announced his administration would marshal the resources of the federal government to meet a new clean energy goal: deploy thirty gigawatts of offshore wind in the United States by 2030, “while protecting biodiversity and promoting ocean co-use.” 

The waters off the New England coast will be particularly busy. Currently, there are nine active leases for wind farms, stacked diagonally in a grid of turbines placed one nautical mile apart, covering a roughly 909,000-nautical-square-mile area about fifteen miles south of the Rhode Island coast, midway between Block Island and Martha’s Vineyard. To date, BOEM has approved the construction and operation plans for two projects, Revolution Wind and South Fork Wind, both developed by Danish renewable energy company Ørsted with partner Eversource, which has since sold its stake in those projects. Revolution, a sixty-five-turbine farm, will deliver power to 350,000 homes in Rhode Island and Connecticut. South Fork, with twelve turbines, will deliver power to 70,000 Long Island homes. A third lease — the Sunwise Wind project, with eighty-four turbines — is in the early stages.

“Offshore wind is vital to the urgent need to address climate change and Rhode Island is on the front line of offshore wind just as it’s on the front line of climate change,” says David Ortiz, Ørsted’s head of government affairs and market strategy for the Northeast. “States cannot reach their clean energy targets without offshore wind. And we continue to believe that it is the best clean energy resource available to the Northeast at utility scale and there’s really incredible potential to generate not only clean energy, but good-paying jobs.” 

A Balancing Act

The transition away from fossil fuel is proving to be a complex balancing of scientific, economic, social and political factors. The wind may be free, but the costs of harnessing its energy and delivering it to consumers are high. It takes billions of dollars and about a decade for an offshore wind farm project to go through planning, a gauntlet of some thirty federal and state permit approvals, and construction. Last year was tough for the wind industry, says energy analyst G. Allen Brooks.

“Not all of the offshore projects talked about are going forward,” he adds. “Wind power is the most expensive form of energy and clean energy. These are very capital-intensive projects. You spend a lot of money upfront before you see a dollar of revenue. The costs aren’t coming down and they have been exacerbated by inflation related to COVID, supply chain disruptions and high interest rates. They are financing large amounts of debt, and when the price of that goes up, that undercuts the economics of the projects that signed power purchase agreements, and they’ve been decimated by that.”

And wind power has not been universally embraced. As of January, BOEM and the U.S. Department of the Interior were facing three lawsuits in federal court brought by Rhode Island organizations: the Preservation Society of Newport County, the Southeast Lighthouse Foundation, and Green Oceans, a citizens-run nonprofit organization. (Green Oceans filed a separate lawsuit in Rhode Island Superior Court against the Coastal Resources Management Council alleging that the CRMC failed to follow state regulations last May when it approved the Revolution project.) 

All three have made a process argument. Specifically, the PSNC and SLF lawsuits allege: Regulators, in the headlong rush to meet clean energy goals, have used a “sham consulting process” with “numerous skipped steps” required by the National Environmental Policy Act and the National Historic Preservation Act and reached “foregone conclusions.”  

“These regulations require the permitting agency to balance the need for development with those laws requiring an evaluation of the harms that all developments do, no matter how green they appear,” says Greg Werkheiser of Cultural Heritage Partners, which represents those plaintiffs. “Folks are saying we need offshore wind to combat climate change so let’s skip over a lot of the normal requirements that protect those resources. But once you break the machine, it will remain broken for future projects, and they essentially are doing successfully what conservative and fossil-fuels companies have been trying and failing to do for decades — weaken those laws.”

The PSNC and the SLF are asking the federal courts to issue an injunction that would halt construction and compel the BOEM to set aside its final approvals for Revolution and South Fork projects, as well as complete a new Environmental Impact Statement in consultation with all stakeholders to better determine the cumulative impacts. 

PSNC CEO Trudy Coxe says she only learned about the installation of hundreds of turbines sited within view of some of the group’s most iconic mansions from her counterpart at another nonprofit. Tourism impacts aside, as a former environmental regulator in Massachusetts and the federal government, she is troubled by what she sees as the failure to follow permitting rules. 

“We are very pro-green technology,” says Coxe, citing PSNC’s considerable investments in geothermal systems to heat several of the mansions. “I just don’t understand the secretiveness of this whole process — and a project so big: the largest in the world.” 

Dr. Gerry Abbott, SLF president, participated in the compensation discussions with Deepwater Wind, the developer of the first Block Island wind farm. And there has been a marked difference in the compensation offer and the negotiating process with Ørsted, he says. The former was a give-and-take in a small conference room with Deepwater’s CEO and island officials. The latter has consisted of a take-it-or-leave-it from the company’s consultants, he says.

“There is a dollar amount out there, but it was less than we ended up getting as mitigation for those first five and now we are talking about a Sherwood Forest of turbines as far as the eye can see,” Abbott says. “Ørsted said: ‘Our consultants say we can help you with your exhibits and your parking.’ Well, we don’t need that help; we already have them. Their so-called consultants failed to consult.”

The regulations governing the offshore wind environmental review for the Outer Continental Shelf Renewable Energy Program were developed with other agencies under the requirements of other environmental, historic preservation and marine life protection laws. Litigation prevented BOEM from responding to the plaintiffs’ claims. But David Diamond, deputy chief of Atlantic operations for the bureau’s Office of Renewable Energy Programs, says “we’re constantly trying to bring more efficiency, clarity and predictability to the process. 

“We support the administration’s goal, but we are also mindful of our unique role as the lead regulatory agency and we want to provide a timely, transparent and durable decision without sacrificing our core values in collaboration with the developers, the tribes, the states, other agencies and stakeholders. We use the best available science no matter where it comes from. We’re on the cusp in the U.S., but we are leveraging the science and experience of offshore wind in other parts of the world.”

Green Oceans fears we actually understand little about the effect of wind turbines on the marine ecosystem. 

“Industrializing the ocean seems to be the worst possible way to combat climate change,” says President Dr. Elizabeth Quattrocki Knight. “There is very little good science out there. All of the assumptions about benefits are model-based, and the empirical data is lacking. We’ve had years to look at the effect of the Block Island Wind Farm and those in the North Sea, but people haven’t asked the questions — we could have had much more data.”

The fishing industry also fears the effects on fish stocks and fishing. For example, on the sea surface, the spacing of the turbines can create navigational hazards; below, the displacement of boulders on the sea floor to lay transmission cables can create obstructions to nets, says Fred Mattera, who is executive director of the Commercial Fisheries Center of Rhode Island and has served as a fisheries representative on the construction plans and compensation packages for offshore wind farm projects. In September, the entire Rhode Island Fishermen’s Advisory Board quit in protest after the CRMC granted its approval to Ørsted’s Sunrise project.

“We love to build and deal with the consequences later. We have stakeholders that represent half a billion dollars and thousands of jobs in the fishing community,” Mattera says. “Are we willing to give that up? I do believe there will be damage to the ecosystem because there’s too many uncertainties.”

Brown University sociologist J. Timmons Roberts says while some concerns may be legitimate, the factual basis for some of the local opposition is built upon a longstanding “structure of opposition” funded by the fossil-fuel industry, which has slowed the progress of renewables from residential rooftop solar to industrial-scale wind farms. In 2020, he founded the Climate Social Science Network to counter misinformation and study the
organizations that he says obstruct climate change action.

“In the U.S., we have the very strong ability for industries to essentially purchase politicians and whole political parties and block anything from happening,” he says. “They finance campaigns, they pay for PACs, fund university programs and think tanks. They have public relations firms and whole media outlets to influence public opinion and policymakers. It’s been very effective, unfortunately.”

‘Full Steam Ahead’

Absent a court-ordered pause, the Revolution and South Fork projects will continue construction. Even less mature projects, grappling with significant setbacks, are moving ahead.   

Caught in the financial crunch, SouthCoast Wind, a 150-turbine wind farm proposed thirty miles south of Martha’s Vineyard, paid $60 million to withdraw from its power-purchase contracts with Massachusetts utilities last year, and hit a major snag when the RI Energy Facility Siting Board suspended its review of the transmission line in response. SouthCoast appealed to the Rhode Island Supreme Court, which declined to take up the case. Nonetheless, SouthCoast’s engineering, financial and permitting teams haven’t stopped, says External Affairs Director Rebecca Ullman. And recently, the company signed a host community agreement with Portsmouth. 

“The scale and the scope of what we are trying to do here is breathtaking, so it makes sense that it’s all not going to go according to plan,” she says. “This year has been absolutely brutal, but [we] work on these projects because we believe in them. And we’ve made it through because our state partners are invested in seeing it through. So, we feel optimistic that we will be able to compete and get these projects back on track.”

She adds: “We’re full steam ahead.” 

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Ellen Liberman is an award-winning journalist who has commented on politics and reported on government affairs for more than two decades.