Only about a dozen Del Norters showed up on a cold Friday evening to hear the latest science concerning offshore wind energy’s potential impact on marine wildlife. The event, held in the United Methodist Church in Crescent City and hosted by the Environmental Protection Information Center (EPIC) of Arcata, was billed as an Offshore Wind Information Panel. Featured speakers addressed the possible interaction between marine mammals, birds and turtles and the giant floating wind turbines proposed for the waters off Del Norte and Humboldt counties.
Before the presentations began, Tom Wheeler, executive director of EPIC, explained the purpose of the event to Redwood Voice. “Under the Biden administration, Del Norte county was slated to have an offshore wind lease executed in the next four years. That’s obviously in question now with the Trump administration, but it’s still important for us to have these conversations and to understand the potential benefits and costs of offshore wind. And so we’re here tonight to help the community have that conversation.”
The presentations began with Wheeler speaking about his travels to the East Coast and Norway to see examples of offshore wind turbines. “This is me and my coworker visiting one of the first offshore wind turbines,” he said, referring to a slide showing a turbine installed off the coast of Norway. “This is a 3 megawatt turbine. To put in perspective the kind of turbines we’re talking about these days, if they were to be installed off California’s coast, we’re anticipating upwards of 20 megawatts. So, this is puny in comparison to what might come to our region.”
Wheeler also showed examples of turbines currently off the coast of Nantucket that are closer in scale to those proposed for Del Norte waters. “This is a 14 megawatt turbine. It’s a fixed bottom turbine. Our oceans are far too deep, the Pacific continental shelf drops off very significantly, unlike the East Coast, so we’re talking about floating wind turbines when it comes to our area. I think floating is one of the things that will make this less impactful in the ocean as compared to fixed bottom.”
Wheeler then asked the assembled a rhetorical question: “Why are we doing this? I started this Powerpoint presentation in 2024, where I got to tell everyone that the previous year was the warmest year on record. And now I get to say that last year was the warmest year on record. We’re doing this because of climate change…” Wheeler referred to the increase in extreme weather events like atmospheric rivers as well as more frequent wildfires that occur year-round.
“I think this next helps illustrate it for me,” he continued. “This is the Trinity Alps. We used to have glaciers in the Trinity Alps…This is the Grizzly Glacier in 2015. It’s gone now. It went extinct in 2022…it disappeared in one person’s lifetime. We watched it disappear. This is what we’re dealing with.”
Wheeler also addressed the changing political environment in Washington, D.C., as Trump has paused new wind energy leases on the continental shelf and ordered a review of existing leases. “Priorities change, elections have consequences,” Wheeler said. “We’re looking at a longish timeline.” The current pause at the federal level could be a good thing for proponents of wind energy, he continued. “We don’t need to be moving forward on the federal side because there’s still a lot of state work that needs to be done.”
The next speaker, speaking remotely, was Mike Lynes, Director of Public Policy for the California chapter of the National Audubon Society. Lynes said one of the main goals of the Audubon Society was habitat preservation. “When I start talking about offshore wind, sometimes people ask ‘why aren’t you doing more on the habitat side?’ and I’ll say we’re doing all we can, but we also know that the habitat side will not be successful if we do not also take climate action.”
Lynes outlined the “peril” global bird populations face by citing a study released five years ago by the journal North American Birds that found bird populations in North America had decreased by a third since 1970. “We are witnessing declines of sea bird populations in the Pacific of 55-95%.” The causes of these declines are complex and follow on the heels of fishery declines that ultimately find their source in climate change and ocean acidification, according to Lynes. “We need to decarbonize as quickly as we can.”
Lynes continued, “As much as we want to look at wind as a potential solution, we’re also not blind to its potential impacts. We are installing massive structures into the environments where birds have lived for millions of years…even the most well-sited, well-mitigated offshore wind project is likely to have impacts.”
Such impacts, Lynes said, include collision with turbine blades that can spin through an area equivalent to 10 football fields, avoidance of an area because of the presence of turbines and the species displacement or migratory changes that can result, and the follow-along changes that come with a general alteration of the marine environment surrounding turbines.
There are potential ways to address these impacts, Lynes said. Making a turbine more visible to birds by painting one of the blades black has been shown to decrease mortality by up to 70 percent. A way to mitigate bird fatalities resulting from collisions with turbines, Lynes said, is to bolster their breeding habitats elsewhere.
“If we can help these species breed and create a more robust population, they’ll be more resilient, not only to the impacts of potential turbines, but to climate change, fishing, and all the other things that are affecting seabirds now.”
Lynes finished by outlining the need for more study. “The last thing…science science science. We don’t understand enough about the sea birds that are off the coast of California.”
The last speaker, also addressing the gathering remotely, was Brandon Southall, Chief Scientist at the California Ocean Alliance and a professor at UC Santa Cruz. Southall’s focus of study has been how sound impacts marine mammals.
Southall, who’s been working on offshore wind issues for ten years, described the complexity and difficulty of studying sound in a marine environment, due mostly to the pervasive nature of sound in a liquid medium as well as the importance of sound to marine life. “The physics of the ocean really prioritize the use of sound to sense the environment, detect other animals, avoid predators, find their way around, find food…it’s central to the way they live.”
Many of the potential impacts of sound on marine life are familiar to humans, according to Southall, one being masking. “What you experience every time you go to a noisy restaurant or a subway in a city where the noise is elevated and you kind of have to talk louder or you can’t hear something…that sound is masking what you hear…it’s like an acoustic fog.”
Another potential impact is temporary or permanent loss of auditory capabilities due to pervasive noise. All of these impacts can lead to behavioral changes that can impact breeding and imperil marine life.
Aquatic noise can also impact strandings, though Southall maintained that strandings seem to be “pretty isolated to certain types of species and certain kinds of sounds, and that’s probably a really rare thing. Obviously, when it happens, it’s bad. It can have locally significant consequences.”
When it comes to offshore wind, Southall said, much of the science comes from Europe and doesn’t include species that are native to the western Pacific. “Some of the work on the east coast is getting to that, but, again, we lack some of the information on the species that are native to the west coast.”
It was at this point in the presentation that Southall addressed some of the disinformation present in the media, specifically concerning strandings that have been attributed to offshore wind.
“The stranding of whales and mortality from offshore wind has largely been debunked,” Southall said. “I would say it’s been entirely debunked, and much of it is just not true, in the sense that most of the strandings that have happened in New York and New Jersey that have been the subject of some of that controversy and podcasts and Joe Rogan and Trump picking up on these things and other people just propagating this stuff on social media…they’re in places where offshore wind has not yet been installed.”
Southall referenced a paper by Leslie Thorne, an associate professor at Stony Brook University’s School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, that “forensically goes through these recent strandings. Almost all of them are humpback whales and almost all of them are documented vessel strikes by vessels that have nothing to do with offshore wind.”
Southall continued, “Again, it’s important to have dialog about this, and people may have heard that there is scientific evidence of strandings of whales from offshore wind. I’m here to tell you that is not the case.”
Southall did concede there are potential mortality concerns from entanglement in cables and other gear, as well as vessel strikes from concentrated vessel activity in areas where such activity has been rare. “I think some of those are relevant concerns and science needs to understand some of those.”
“I would encourage you,” Southall said, “if you are at all interested in this to just Google Duke [University] and wildlife and offshore wind.”
At the end of the presentation, the panel took questions from the audience that had dwindled to nine people. Retired teacher and Del Norte Trail Alliance head Joe Gillespie asked if migrating gray whales would be able to work their way around cables. Southall answered that gray whales tend to migrate closer to shore where the cables would be on the bottom. “For some other species,” Southall said, “that we know are susceptible to entanglement and/or vessel strikes that are endangered like blue whales and fin whales, they could be using some of those offshore areas.”
Another attendee asked about the electromagnetic effects from cables on the behavior of marine life. Southall answered, “We don’t really know completely how some of these large animals that make really long migrations find their way around, but the detection of the magnetic field of the earth…is not out of the realm of possibility.” Southall acknowledged that the type of floating turbines proposed for the deep waters off the northern California coast have not been built before, and that in terms of some benthic species like sharks and rays that live close to the bottom where they would encounter cables the possible effects would be small, though there remain a few “question marks” concerning other migratory species like sea turtles, “all of which are endangered.”
Del Norte resident Gordon Pfeffer closed the discussion with a comment. “There’s been so much species degradation that’s occurred long before we were even considering wind turbines, and there’s going to be so much more from increased climate change…I mean, I really fully appreciate all you people doing everything you can to mitigate the possible effects, but the effects are so enormous outside of wind turbines, and the benefits could be so much greater for so many species in the big picture to reduce CO2 emissions…why aren’t we getting to it? It needs to be done yesterday.”
“Agreed!” Wheeler said.
One of the attendees who left early was Crescent City Harbor Commissioner Annie Nehmer. Redwood Voice reached out to her after the meeting to get her thoughts on the panel and ask why she’d left.
“I went to figure out why they were still doing wind energy,” Nehmer said. “As you know, from my stance before, I did not agree with it. I don’t understand, if you need more electricity why wouldn’t the environmental issue be to push conservation, using less electricity? Or being smart about how you use it? I don’t agree with polluting the ocean with electrical noise and a lot of their slideshows were tailor-made and I was frustrated. They were leaving out a lot of science to justify their science.”
Asked after the panel discussion if the low turnout was disappointing, Wheeler replied that he was not disappointed. “It was a rainy Friday night and I think, rightly, that there is a sense that offshore wind off of Del Norte isn’t imminent,” Wheeler wrote in an emailed response. “That said, we are glad to put on informational panels for the community so that when circumstances change, the community is prepared and ready to advocate for itself and its best interests.”
Wheeler said a full recording of the event will be posted soon to northcoastoffshorewind.org.
