Residents of Nantucket, Massachusetts, are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review a lower court’s rejection of their challenge to federal approval of offshore wind turbines.
The residents argue that a wind farm in the Cape Cod community is placing at risk an endangered species of whale and that federal agencies failed to follow the law when assessing the environmental impact of the project. They also say the turbines are damaging the local environment.
The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) is an agency inside the U.S. Department of the Interior.
The bureau’s mission is managing the development of “U.S. Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) energy, mineral, and geological resources in an environmentally and economically responsible way.” The OCS refers to all submerged land and seabed that belongs to the United States but falls outside the jurisdiction of individual U.S. states.
The federal government approved locating the country’s first utility-scale offshore wind turbine project, known as Vineyard Wind 1, 15 miles off the coast of Nantucket. The project is owned by Avangrid and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, which do business through Vineyard Wind LLC, which in turn is building Vineyard Wind 1, according to the petition.
The project is touted as the first of the government’s “coordinated steps” to build about 30 wind turbine projects “along the Atlantic seaboard that, when built out, will have thousands of turbines covering millions of acres of federal submerged lands.”
Vineyard Wind LLC has built or is in the process of building 47 of the total of 62 approved fixed-bottom wind turbines. Each turbine rises 853 feet above the water and is almost triple the size of the Statue of Liberty.
The petition states that the 47 turbines are already harming the environment. For example, in July 2024 a large piece of a 350-foot blade broke off from one of the turbines and fiberglass shards from it littered Nantucket’s beaches. Also, the turbines may threaten the endangered North American right whale, only 388 of which still exist, by interfering with their habitat and migratory routes.
Moreover, even though federal law requires the government to examine the “best information available” regarding the impact that a project may have on an endangered or threatened species and their habitats, the BOEM and National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) failed to consider the “cumulative impacts of other planned projects when they authorized and issued permits to construct the Vineyard Wind 1 Project.”
The residents say the agencies that leased the water area to wind energy companies left relevant data out of their assessment so they could facilitate offshore wind energy development.
The U.S. Department of Justice, which is representing BOEM, didn’t reply by publication time to a request for comment.
The White House has said building the fixed-bottom turbines would support 77,000 jobs, prevent 78 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, and lead to $12 billion annually invested privately in offshore wind projects.
