Posted on October 30, 2024
The town of Ocean City has filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging the wind farm that is closest to beginning construction along its shoreline.
The suit, filed Friday by a Washington, D.C., law firm representing the resort town, alleges that the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management violated federal law when it approved the construction plan for U.S. Wind’s project in the Atlantic earlier this year.
The lengthy list of co-plaintiffs also includes the owners of beloved local businesses, such as the Jolly Roger at the Pier amusement park and Thrasher’s French Fries, and hotels such as the Carousel Oceanfront Resort and Castle in the Sand. Also included are commercial fishermen, a marina owner and the company that operates the White Marlin Open fishing tournament annually, which draws more than 1,500 anglers per year and has a 50-year history.
Neighboring Fenwick Island, Delaware’s town council are also plaintiffs, as are the commissioners for Worcester County, which includes Ocean City, and other local organizations opposed to the turbines.
The filing represents the latest step in town officials’ long battle against the installation of massive ocean-based turbines that would be visible from its beaches.
“We have a responsibility to protect our ecosystem, our economy, view shed and our future,” said Ocean City Mayor Rick Meehan in a statement. “For the past seven and half years we have been trying to work with the State of Maryland and the federal government to address our concerns with this project. All of our concerns were either ignored or considered insignificant. It is unfortunate that it has come to this.”
A spokesperson for the bureau, which is housed within the U.S. Department of the Interior, declined to comment, citing a policy against speaking about litigation.
U.S. Wind, which also declined to comment on Friday’s filing, has proposed 114 turbines that would be as close as approximately 11 miles from shore, according to documents filed by the company to the Maryland Public Service Commission. The build-out would occur in several phases, with the first turbines intended for operation in 2028, according to the commission document.
The commission, which regulates electric utilities in Maryland, is currently reviewing U.S. Wind’s proposal to update a power purchase agreement originally set in 2017.
Earlier this year, the Maryland General Assembly voted to convene the new process, after the other offshore wind company with a lease area off Maryland’s coast pulled out of its power deal with the state, arguing the pricing limits were out of date due to inflation and other pressures on the wind industry.
Hearings for the case are ongoing, and a commission decision on the U.S. Wind proposal is expected by Jan. 24, said commission spokesperson Tori Leonard.
The lawsuit against BOEM was filed by Marzulla Law, an environmental firm that is also behind a suit from Nantucket residents opposing the Vineyard Wind Project planned for the Massachusetts coast. After a First Circuit judge ruled the case should be dismissed, the firm petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court for review in September.
The Ocean City case follows a similar legal argument, setting its sights on the environmental review issued by the ocean energy bureau.
The suit argues that the agency acted hastily, and failed to consider a number of required topics in its review, in part because of a federal goal to have 30 gigawatts of offshore wind energy by 2030. Maryland itself has a legislatively approved goal of 8.5 gigawatts of power from offshore wind by 2031. A new lease area east of the Delaware beaches and northern Ocean City was leased to Norwegian company Equinor earlier this year.
The federal goal “set into motion a coordinated effort to approve major federal undertakings on the Outer Continental Shelf as fast as possible, sacrificing a transparent approval process,” Friday’s lawsuit states.
When BOEM’s analysis was released in July, bureau Director Elizabeth Klein said in a statement that the review “carefully considered the best available science and information provided by Tribes, other government agencies, local communities, industry, ocean users, and environmental organizations. This vital collaboration with all our government partners and stakeholders will continue through the subsequent phases of the project.”
The agency said it considered several project alternatives, including an option where “no action” would be taken on the project, ultimately concluding that environmental impacts did not warrant bringing the project to a halt. The lengthy review considered a number of subjects, including biological resources from bats and birds to finfish, whales and sea turtles. It also considered socioeconomic factors such as fisheries, vessel navigation and tourism.
The federal government approval, which came down in September, also requires U.S. Wind to adopt a number of mitigation and reporting requirements for the environmental impact of the turbines.
For its part, the suit alleges that BOEM violated federal law by segmenting the environmental analyses for various wind projects in the Atlantic, failing to consider the cumulative impact of “thousands of turbines and thousands of miles of cable that will cover millions of acres of pristine seabed and open ocean on the human and natural environment,” reads the lawsuit.
Further, the suit argues that BOEM’s review failed to adequately consider the Maryland project’s potential impacts to endangered species such as the North Atlantic right whale, or to other species such as horseshoe crabs and sea turtles, and to tourism and commercial fishing.
The lawsuit says that BOEM’s analysis also fell short when it came to analyzing the project’s climate change impact, arguing that the analysis focused on emissions reductions that would be spurred by the energy generation, compared to fossil fuel burning, but that the analysis included “limited qualitative descriptions of emissions generated from construction.”
BOEM’s analysis stated that, “ Local emissions, such as those from the construction of wind energy projects, would contribute to global emissions, and those global emissions do have impacts whose local effects are increasingly realized.”
“However, as renewable energy projects begin operating and replacing fossil-fueled power-generating facilities (current and future facilities needed to meet energy demands), power generation emissions overall could decrease,” read the environmental review.
The tourism analysis by BOEM was also short-sighted, according to the suit, because it cited minimal impacts to tourism from the Block Island wind project in Rhode Island, which was a smaller project, according to the Ocean City lawsuit.
BOEM concluded that the impacts to recreation and tourism would be “moderate adverse,” but there would also be minor beneficial impacts, including the sightseeing attraction of offshore wind energy structures and the “reef effect,” wherein the structures could create reef-life habitat for wildlife.
Negative effects would result from both short-term impacts of construction, including noise, anchored vessels and cable installation, and from the long-term presence of turbines and cable structures in the ocean, some of which could be seen from land and impact navigation by vessels.
