Via David Wojick
The Fed has acknowledged that offshore wind development can cause the deaths of whales and other marine mammals, but it actually declined to assess that threat to any energy facilities. what amount of wind. So I’m here outlining what such a study would look like. This kind of research is something they’re afraid to do because it would give numbers on likely deaths, by species.
First off, here’s the Feds’ own description of some of the known deadly threats. In this case, offshore wind activity is driving the monster piles that support the turbine towers, but there are others. The Feds say this in the Draft Environmental Impact Statement for the proposed Empire Wind project off the coast of New York and New Jersey:
“Pile driving can cause animals to relocate into areas with lower habitat quality or a higher risk of boat collisions or fisheries interactions. Multiple construction activities in the same calendar year have the potential to affect migration, foraging, calving, and individual fitness. The degree of impact will depend on the location, duration and timing of concurrent construction. Such effects can be long-lasting, intense, and high-exposure. In general, the more frequently or the longer an individual’s normal behaviors are disrupted, the greater the likelihood of biologically important consequences for the individual’s fitness. The potential for biologically significant effects is expected to increase with the number of piling events an individual is exposed to.”
Empire Wind DEIS v.1, Pages 3.15-14, PDF page 372
In this case, the federal agencies are the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) and the NOAA Fisheries Administration (NFMS), which jointly prepare the DEIS. Other agencies are also responsible for marine mammals.
My focus here is on displacement resulting in a higher risk of boat collision or fisheries interaction, as mentioned in the first DEIS sentence above. This is clearly the case when a whale or other creature is driven into a busy train lane by excessive noise and is killed or entangled in nets, tangled and drowned. Many of the proposed wind facilities are located where this is reasonably likely to happen.
It is important that the first step in the design of my study was carried out in great detail. What I describe is a simple extension of the current method. For any wind project activity that generates excessive underwater noise, NMFS estimates the number of organisms, by species, that will experience unsafe noise levels.
They call this unsafe noise experience harassment. For some projects, the number of harassment incidents is predicted to be in the hundreds for whales and in the thousands for protected smaller mammals such as dolphins and seals.
Estimating the number of harassment cases is quite technical, but the basic idea is quite simple. First, imagine how excessive noise would be distributed in the ocean. Then, given the estimated population density of organisms in that noise distribution, calculate the number of animals affected by the excessive noise.
As the quote above makes clear, harassment can cause deadly behavior. The Feds don’t address this problem, but simply the mortality rate of harassment. So here is an outline of how it can be done.
Step 1: Harassment
Get or estimate data on organism density and unsafe noise distribution, over time. Estimate the number and distribution of possible harassment. This has been done.
Step 2: Evade due to harassment
Given the organism density and the noise distribution, both over time draw the changes in the organism density due to the noise. Animals will likely flee unsafe noises and move to neighboring areas, increasing the population density of these areas.
Step 3: Threat Density
Get or estimate threat density and distribution over time. Threat density includes things like the number of vessels in traffic, possibly by vessel type and speed, grid location, etc. Detailed data on vessel traffic is available for several sites.
Step 4: Increased mortality
Get an increase in exposure to deadly threats by dodging. Increased densities in high-threat areas mean increased mortality.
Step 5: Screening
Factor in adverse effects associated with avoidance, such as deafness, panic attacks, etc.
That is the study outline. If they could estimate the number of harassments by species, they could easily go on to estimate the deadly consequences of harassment using similar density-based methods. This can also be done for migration, foraging and other obvious impacts listed in the DEIS quote above.
The research question is simple: What is the rate of death from harassment for a given offshore wind project?
The Feds must answer that mortality question before the project’s environmental impact assessment is complete. They should also evaluate multiple projects, as discussed in the DEIS quote above.
Author
David Wojick, Ph.D. is an independent analyst working at the intersection of science, technology and policy. For the origin see http://www.stemed.info/engineer_tackles_confusion.html For more than 100 previous articles for CFACT see http://www.cfact.org/author/david-wojick-ph-d/ Available for confidential research and consultation.
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