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WE CAN’T IGNORE THAT OFFSHORE WIND FARMS ARE PART OF MARINE ECOSYSTEMS

Offshore wind farms can create their own local climates and may alter currents.
How does that affect marine life around them?

By Becki Robins / Undark | Published Aug 24, 2023 9:00 PM EDT

 * Environment


Scientists have a lot more work to do before they can know the true effect of
thousands of offshore wind turbines, as well as how and where they should be
built. DepositPhotos
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This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

Last year, the Biden administration announced an ambitious goal: enough offshore
wind to power 10 million homes by 2030. The move would reduce carbon emissions,
create jobs, and strengthen energy security. It would also help the United
States—which was responsible for just 0.1 percent of the world’s offshore wind
capacity last year—catch up with renewable energy leaders like China and Europe.

The plan is already well underway: Massive turbines are rising off the coast of
Massachusetts, and more projects are planned up and down the U.S. coastlines.
Advocates say these turbines, and other offshore projects around the world, are
a crucial tool in minimizing the effects of climate change: The technology is
touted as clean, renewable, and plentiful. And, since offshore wind farms aren’t
located in anyone’s backyard, they are, at least in theory, less prone to the
political pushback onshore wind power has faced.

It will take a lot of turbines to meet Biden’s 2030 goal, and while wind
turbines don’t use fossil fuels or generate carbon emissions, they are enormous
structures, with some reaching heights of more than 850 feet above the water’s
surface. (The Statue of Liberty, in comparison, stands a little over 300 feet.)
As such, they will likely have some effect on the ocean environment.



Scientists already know some of the local impacts of wind farms. For example,
they can, somewhat counterintuitively, reduce local wind speed. They also create
their own local climates, and cause disturbances in the water in the form of a
downwind wake. But what those changes might mean for marine life or for
industries that depend on ocean resources is something that scientists are still
trying to figure out.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., offshore wind has become the subject of bitter political
disagreement and fear, fueling lobbying and lawsuits aimed at halting projects
before they even begin. As researchers work to model potential outcomes, they
stress that they don’t want to derail offshore wind, but rather seek to better
understand it so that any negative effects can be minimized, and positive
effects maximized.

Scientists have a lot more work to do before they can know the true effect of
thousands of offshore wind turbines, as well as how and where they should be
built. There may even be questions they haven’t thought to ask yet, said Ute
Daewel, a scientist who studies marine ecosystems at The Helmholtz-Zentrum
Hereon in Germany.

“It’s so complex,” she said, “that I sometimes think we probably also miss a lot
of things that might happen.”

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Advocates of offshore wind turbines can point to a range of benefits—starting
with their proximity to the places most in need of clean energy. Around 40
percent of the world’s population lives within 60 miles of the ocean. Energy
demand in densely populated coastal regions tends to be high, so offshore wind
farms will be located close to where they are most needed.



Evidence suggests offshore wind power could lower energy costs, especially
during extreme events like cold snaps when energy demands are high and wholesale
prices peak. Meanwhile, the Department of Energy says that, in addition to
reducing carbon emissions, the technology would improve human health by cutting
air pollution from fossil fuels.

But wind farms have also come under intense criticism from a diverse coalition
of stakeholders, including conservation nonprofits worried about the impact on
marine ecosystems, fishing industry groups concerned about access to traditional
fishing grounds, coastal homeowners keen to maintain their views, and groups
that appear to be funded by large oil companies hoping to stifle competition.

Some of those criticisms focus on the impact on animals. Like onshore wind, the
turbines can kill birds, though some researchers studying large-bodied
waterbirds like sea ducks and geese have found they tend to avoid the turbines,
which may mean less bird mortality offshore. Recent criticism from Republican
lawmakers also suggests that the noise from offshore wind turbines might kill
whales, although the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says
there’s no evidence to back up this concern.

Meanwhile, some research suggests wind farms might even help fish and other
marine life. “A lot of people say, hey, this is going to be a habitat
improvement because there’s going to be rocks on the bottom, which make
artificial reefs,” said Daphne Munroe, a shellfish ecologist at Rutgers
University. “And that’s absolutely true. But it’s a shift away from what was
there.”



Munroe studies pressures on marine ecosystems, including the effects of climate,
pollution, and resource exploitation. She’s also the lead author of a 2022
Bureau of Ocean Energy Management study on the impacts of offshore wind on
surfclams—a type of clam commonly used to make chowders, soups, and stews. (The
BOEM study was funded by the federal agency; Munroe has received funding from
wind farm developers to conduct other projects.)

The fishing industry fears wind farms will affect their ability to yield a
profitable catch — especially since the windy, shallow waters that support a
rich diversity of sea life also tend to be ideal locations for turbines. Some
scientists say these fears have been overblown—a 2022 study, for example,
concluded that the Block Island Wind Farm located off the coast of Rhode Island
does not appear to negatively impact bottom-dwelling fish. (Coastal regulators
in the state of Rhode Island mandated the study be conducted and paid for by
wind farm developers.) Others, like Munroe, say specific fisheries such as
Atlantic surfclams will be significantly affected.

Surfclam fishing in wind farm areas, said Munroe, is logistically difficult, if
not impossible, since vessels use dredges that drag though the sand to collect
the clams. The presence of power cables on the ocean floor, she said, would make
it too dangerous to use this kind of equipment around wind farms.

Installed boulders surrounding turbine foundations will also create obstacles,
according to Munroe. “Each of the foundations is going to have what’s called
scour protection,” she said. “So basically, big boulder fields that are going to
be placed around the base of the turbine foundation in order to prevent the sand
from scouring away.”

Currently, there are no legal restrictions on fishing in windfarm areas, Munroe
said, just physical ones. “They could still get out there, but in order to fish
efficiently and be able to get the catch they need and get back to the dock in a
reasonable amount of time, it just wouldn’t be feasible,” she said. In her 2022
study, Munroe and her co-authors concluded that the presence of large offshore
wind farms could cause fleet revenues to decline by up to 14 percent in some
areas.

The industry has also been vocal about other consequences, such as habitat
destruction and the possibility that the turbines’ sound might affect fish
populations. In Maine, lobstermen worry that heavy mooring lines will drive
their catch away. In Massachusetts, groups that represent fishing interests have
filed lawsuits against the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management on the grounds that
the agency failed to consider the fishing industry when it approved the
62-turbine Vineyard Wind project.

“The Bureau made limited efforts to review commercial fishing impacts,” wrote
the plaintiffs in one of the Vineyard Wind lawsuits. “The limited effort that
was made focused almost solely on impacts to the State of Massachusetts and on
the scallop fishery, despite other fisheries being more active in the lease
areas.”

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Physical changes to the ecosystem, such as the placement of turbine foundations
and scour protection, are some of the more obvious impacts of offshore wind
turbines. But wind farms might elicit more subtle changes in local weather,
affecting wind patterns and water currents, which models predict could
reverberate through the food chain.

A 2023 study led by oceanographer Kaustubha Raghukumar, for example, found that
turbine-driven alterations in wind speed could produce changes in ocean
upwelling—a natural process where cold water from the deeper parts of the ocean
rises to the surface—“outside the bounds of natural variability.” Those cold
waters contain nutrients that support phytoplankton, the single-celled plants
and other tiny organisms that form the basis of the oceanic food chain. Shifts
in upwelling could have an impact on phytoplankton—although those impacts are
still in question, particularly as climate change alters the equation.

Raghukumar and his colleagues at Integral, an environmental consulting company,
based their predictions off historical data. But such an approach might not
create an accurate picture of what will happen in the future as some scientists
predict warmer global temperatures will produce stronger winds and increased
upwelling, while others foresee localized decreases in upwelling. In their 2023
paper, which was funded by the California Energy Commission and the Ocean
Protection Council, the authors noted that wind farms might reinforce—or even
counteract—some of these climate change-driven changes in upwelling, but that
all remains uncertain.

While Raghukumar’s study didn’t model how changes in upwelling might affect
marine life, other scientists are closely studying possible changes to the
ecosystem, though these are also likely to be complex and difficult to predict.
A 2022 paper modeled the effect that planned wind farms might have in the North
Sea, off the coasts of the U.K. and Norway, and concluded that they could
influence phytoplankton, which could alter the food web.

Daewel, the study’s lead author, stopped short of drawing conclusions about what
these changes might mean for the ecosystem as a whole. “We cannot say if that’s
really a bad thing or a good thing because the ecosystem is very dynamic,
especially in the North Sea,” she said.

Changes to ocean processes could impact fish survival, but, again, no one is
really sure how. “Young fish need to be in a specific area at a specific time to
find the right types of prey,” said Daewel. “So this redistribution of ecosystem
parameters, that could mean that there might be a mismatch, or a better match
also, for fishery life stages. But this is purely hypothetical.”

With or without wind farms, climate change is already altering the timing of
critical ecosystem processes, said Robert Dorrell, lead author of a 2022 paper
that investigated the effects of offshore wind on seasonally stratified shelf
seas—coastal regions where water separates during the spring into different
layers, with warm water at the top and colder water at the bottom. Shelf seas
only represent about 8 percent of the ocean, but the phytoplankton that bloom
there generate an estimated 15 to 30 percent of the organic matter that forms
the basis of the food web.

In seasonally stratified shelf seas, phytoplankton grow in the upper layers,
using up nutrients but also creating a food source for a myriad of marine
animals. When the bloom is over, ocean mixing, a natural process driven by wind
and waves, helps bring oxygen to the bottom layers and nutrients to the top,
ensuring that creatures at every level can thrive. But climate change is
expected to increase ocean stratification, which interferes with natural ocean
mixing.

“When you have cold water underneath, which is of a higher density, that density
difference makes it harder in general to mix water vertically, upwards or
downwards,” said Dorrell.

Dorrell and his co-authors believe that wind farms could provide a partial
solution to this problem by introducing artificial mixing of stratified shelf
seas. This process, Dorrell said, is a little like stirring a cup of French
coffee. “We have a nice coffee on the bottom and then you have foamy milk on the
top. And if you would get a spoon and stir your French coffee you would mix the
light milk up with the heavier coffee below.”

In much the same way, the downwind wake generated by an offshore turbine could
help mix the warm and cold layers of water, which might help offset some of the
effects of climate change.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Fortunately, scientists like Dorrell say, there is time to figure out the more
subtle nuances of offshore wind and its larger effects on the marine ecosystem.
“I think what we have to remember with offshore wind is that although there are
plans underway at the moment, they are long-term plans,” he said. “In the U.K.,
for example, there are targets for 2030 certainly, but there are targets all the
way through to 2050 and beyond. And there’s certainly time there for research to
inform and support and maximize the best delivery of offshore wind for the
benefit of everybody.”

Daewel added that papers like hers, which might suggest potential problems,
aren’t an argument against wind farms. Instead, they are a call to closely
monitor existing wind farms and those that will be built in the future. “I think
that’s kind of the rule here, to be cautious and make sure that you understand
what’s happening to your system while you’re building,” she said.

It’s possible that the way wind farms are built and where they are placed might
help reduce potential negative impacts on the ocean ecosystem, though that
research has yet to be done. “I think it will be a really interesting
optimization kind of study, to kind of place the turbines in different locations
and different densities,” said Raghukumar. The information gleaned from such a
study, he said, could be used to balance the benefits of wind energy against any
adverse consequences.

As research into the impacts of offshore wind energy continues, scientists say
it’s important to maintain a sense of perspective, since fossil fuels also
affect the ocean by driving changes to the climate.

“It’s not our intention to say this is a negative development. It’s also not our
intention to say wind parks destroy the ecosystem. That’s not what our research
shows,” Daewel said. “I just want to stress the research shows that we need to
expect changes, and it’s better to learn that as soon as possible.”

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Becki Robins is a freelance writer who lives with her family in rural Northern
California. She writes about science, nature, history, and travel; her favorite
stories include a little of all four. Her work has appeared in Science News,
Comstock’s Magazine, Hakai Magazine, and others.

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

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