Media Coverage

Bloomberg Baystate Business for Monday, March 8th, 2021

– Boston Globe business columnist Shirley Leung on the development of Widett Circle and other issues (3:18)

– Joanne Hilferty, Chair of the Board of the Associated Industries of Massachusetts (AIM) on the exodus of women from the workforce and what business leaders ought to do about (15:26)

– Janet Wu interviews one of the youngest female founders in Massachusetts. Rajia Abdelaziz was still in college when she had the idea to combine high tech with jewelry. Invisawear is a fashionable approach to personal safety (26:10)

– Bloomberg News markets reporter Katie Greifeld on the day in the markets (35:33)

– Bloomberg News national political reporter Gregory Korte on the latest news out of DC (47:38)

– Commonwealth Magazine reporter Shira Schoenberg on the latest moves concerning vote-by-mail in Massachusetts (54:00)

– Annie Hawkins, executive director of Responsible Offshore Development Agency in Washington, DC, representing fishermen who say Vineyard Wind will curtail their catch (1:00:40)

The Biden administration on Monday announced the completion of an environmental review of Vineyard Wind, a crucial step toward the long-delayed $2.8 billion offshore project becoming the nation’s first commercial-scale offshore wind farm.

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s final environmental impact statement was released a little over a month after the agency’s new director, Amanda Lefton, pledged to conduct a “robust and timely” review of Vineyard Wind, picking up where the permitting process left off in December.

Advocates of renewable energy and lawmakers lauded the report, but commercial fishing groups reiterated their opposition to the plan for the wind farm, saying the federal government has not addressed their concerns.

Annie Hawkins, executive director of the Responsible Offshore Development Alliance, said there hasn’t been enough opportunity for people in the fishing industry and the public to become informed and weigh in on the proposal.

“Fishermen care about what the environmental impacts are going to be, and the impacts to their businesses, and to fish stocks, and to the ecosystem at large,” Hawkins said. “And they care about being engaged in the project so that they can bring their input, their knowledge to create acceptable means of mitigation. That just hasn’t happened.”

The Interior Department said on Monday it had completed its environmental review for a massive wind farm off the coast of Massachusetts, a key step toward final approval of the long-stalled project that will play a prominent role in President Joe Biden’s effort to expand renewable energy in the U.S.

The completion of the review is a breakthrough for the U.S. offshore wind industry, which has lagged behind its European counterparts and the U.S. onshore industry that has grown rapidly, even during the pandemic. It also marks a key acceleration for the Biden administration that has advocated renewables growth on public lands and waters.

In a statement last week, a fishing industry advocacy group, the Responsible Offshore Development Alliance, said it would appear “fishing communities are the only ones screaming into a void while public resources are sold to the highest bidder.”

Federal environmental officials have completed their review of the Vineyard Wind I offshore wind farm, moving the project that is expected to deliver clean renewable energy to Massachusetts by the end of 2023 closer to becoming a reality.

The U.S. Department of the Interior said Monday morning that its Bureau of Ocean Energy Management completed the analysis it resumed about a month ago, published the project’s final environmental impact statement, and said it will officially publish notice of the impact statement in the Federal Register later this week.

The commercial fishing industry has been among the most vocal opponents of aspects of the Vineyard Wind project and the Responsible Offshore Development Alliance (RODA) has repeatedly urged the new administration to ensure the voices of the industry are heard throughout the licensing and permitting process.

In comments submitted earlier this month in response to a BOEM review of an offshore wind project that is expected to deliver power to New York, RODA said the present is “a time of significant confusion and change in the U.S. approach to offshore wind energy (OSW) planning” and detailed mitigation measures it wants to see incorporated into all projects.

“To be clear, none of these requests are new — nor hardly radical. They have simply been ignored again, and again, and again in a political push/pull between multinational energy companies and the U.S. government, leaving world-famous seafood, and the communities founded around its harvest, off the table,” the group said in a press release last week. Some of RODA’s suggestions were analyzed as part of BOEM’s Vineyard Wind review.

Federal officials have completed the environmental review of the Vineyard Wind I offshore wind project that is expected to deliver clean renewable energy to Massachusetts by the end of 2023.

The U.S. Department of the Interior said Monday morning that its Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) completed the analysis it resumed about a month ago and will officially publish notice of the project’s final environmental impact statement in the Federal Register later this week.

The commercial fishing industry has been among the most vocal opponents of aspects of the Vineyard Wind project. The Responsible Offshore Development Alliance has repeatedly urged the Biden administration to ensure the voices of the industry are heard throughout the licensing and permitting process.

With the final environmental impact statement published, Vineyard Wind still must secure a record of decision and sign-offs from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the National Marine Fisheries Service to officially clear the way for the project. It is on track to be the nation’s first utility-scale offshore wind farm.

Three marine vessels that study the makeup and geology of seabeds are scheduled to arrive in Maine over the next week or so to survey the proposed route of an underwater cable that will link a floating, offshore wind turbine near Monhegan Island with the mainland power grid in East Boothbay.

The vessels are scheduled to be on site next Monday through April 4, weather permitting. They are planning to conduct three passes along the 23-mile route, as well as study the area where the turbine will be anchored in state waters south of the island.

While the location of offshore wind turbines has gotten a lot of attention from fishing interests worldwide, the siting of the cables that connect turbines to each other and to the mainland has received less scrutiny, according to Annie Hawkins, executive director of the Responsible Offshore Development Alliance, a Washington, D.C.-based national coalition of fishing industry associations and companies.

The network of cables can have a greater impact on fisheries than the turbine towers and anchoring systems, she said, because they cover more sea bottom. The best practice, Hawkins said, is to work with knowledgeable fishermen to find the optimum routes and bury cables fully whenever possible.

WHEN THE TRUMP administration dragged its feet on the environmental permitting of Vineyard Wind, wind energy proponents in Massachusetts and across the country cried foul, claiming politics was driving the process.

But now that the Biden administration is in office, the same claim is surfacing as the president quickly moves in the opposite direction.

The Responsible Offshore Development Alliance, which advocates for the US fishing industry, on Wednesday released comments it sent to Amanda Lefton, the new head of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, questioning how her agency could simply revive a regulatory process that had been terminated by the same agency (which was then under Trump’s oversight) in December.

“It would appear that fishing communities are the only ones screaming into a void while public resources are sold to the highest bidder, as BOEM has reversed its decision to terminate a project after receiving a single letter from Vineyard Wind,” the alliance said in a statement.