Erin L. Meyer-Gutbrod, Douglas Nowacek, Eileen E. Hofmann, and Josh Kohut
As renewable energy production expands across the U.S., the environmental impacts of these new sources are receiving increased attention. In a recent report, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine examined whether and how constructing offshore wind farms in the Nantucket Shoals region, southeast of Massachusetts, could affect critically endangered North Atlantic right whales. The Conversation asked marine scientists Erin L. Meyer-Gutbrod, Douglas Nowacek, Eileen E. Hofmann and Josh Kohut, all of whom served on the study committee, to explain the report’s key findings.
Why did this study focus on such a specific site?
The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which is part of the U.S. Department of the Interior and regulates offshore energy production, asked the National Academies to conduct this study. Regulators wanted to better understand how installing and operating offshore, fixed-bottom wind turbine generators would affect physical oceanographic processes, such as tides, waves and currents, and in turn how those changes could affect the ecosystem.
For example, offshore wind turbines decrease wind speeds behind them, and the presence of their structures makes the water more turbulent. These changes could affect ocean currents, surface wind speeds and other factors that influence hydrodynamics – the structure and movement of the water around the turbines.
The Nantucket Shoals region is a large, shallow area in the Atlantic that extends south of Cape Cod. Our report focused on it because this is the first large-scale offshore wind farm area in the U.S., and the region has been included in several recent hydrodynamic modeling studies.
NASEM 2023, CC BY-ND
Why are North Atlantic right whales of special concern?
North Atlantic right whales are critically endangered. Scientists estimate that the population is down to just 356 animals.
This species was almost driven to extinction after centuries of commercial whaling. Even though the whales have been protected from whaling for almost 100 years, they are still accidentally killed when they are hit by vessels or become entangled in fishing gear. These two sources of mortality are responsible for most documented juvenile and adult right whale deaths over the past 25 years.
There are options for protecting them, such as slowing or rerouting boats, shortening the fishing season or even modifying fishing gear to make it more whale-safe. However, regulators need to know where the whales are going to be and when they’ll be there, so they can put those protections in place.
It’s usually hard to figure out where whales are – they have a large habitat and spend most of their time below the surface of the water, where observers can’t see them. Recently it’s gotten even harder, because climate change is causing whales to shift where and when they feed.
Currently, right whales are spending more time around the Nantucket Shoals region. This means scientists and managers need to make sure that wind energy development in the area is happening safely and that threats to whales in the area are reduced.
How might offshore wind farms affect right whales in the study area?
Right whales are filter feeders that consume huge quantities of tiny zooplankton. The whales need to find large, dense patches of zooplankton at appropriate water depths in order to feed. Altering waves, tides and currents in ways that affect where their prey are located could affect whale feeding or cause the whales to change foraging habitats.
We concluded that it is critical to consistently monitor right whales and their prey within and outside the region, because we don’t know whether wind development will cause an increase, a decrease or no change to their zooplankton prey. Consistent monitoring will allow managers to mitigate potential negative impacts on the whales.
Researchers will need to collect data during all phases of wind farm construction and operation and develop robust models to determine whether wind farms will affect prey availability for right whales in the study area. Even once they do this research, it will still be difficult to isolate potential impacts from wind farms.
There is a tremendous amount of both natural and human-driven variability and change in this region, including tides, seasonal changes in water temperature and long-term ocean warming driven by climate change. Climate-driven shifts in prey in distant regions, such as the Bay of Fundy or the Gulf of St. Lawrence, may also change how right whales use the Nantucket Shoals region.
Development of the first wind energy farms in the Nantucket Shoals region is a valuable opportunity to better understand hydrodynamic impacts of turbines on marine ecosystems. We expect that it will help guide future development of wind farms along the U.S. East Coast.
NREL
What are the most important knowledge gaps?
Few studies have been done to understand hydrodynamics around wind energy turbines, and those that exist focus on European offshore wind farms in the North Sea, where conditions are different from Nantucket Shoals. Large turbines of the size planned for the Nantucket Shoals region have not been built yet in U.S. waters.
Researchers have tried to model the hydrodynamic impacts of turbines, but their results don’t always agree with each other. There’s a need for more work to compare different types of models with each other, and with actual observations in the ocean, to make sure that they represent key processes like tides, stratification, turbulence and drag correctly.
The most accurate outputs will likely come from using a range of models. Oceanographers might start with models that predict what happens as water moves past a single turbine. These results then would inform models that predict the effects of an entire wind farm. Then results from wind farm-scale models would be incorporated into models that predict regional ocean circulation.
There are also a lot of knowledge gaps on the biology side, including questions about what species of zooplankton are in the Nantucket Shoals region, where they come from and what makes them aggregate into patches that are dense enough for right whales to eat. Right whale feeding in the Nantucket Shoals region isn’t well understood, so scientists need more observations to determine which zooplankton types are targeted by right whales and where and when the whales feed.
Does the report call for slowing offshore wind development until these questions are answered?
No, and we were not asked to provide recommendations for how the wind industry should proceed with construction.
Nantucket Shoals is one of many regions where large-scale wind farms will be built in U.S. waters over the coming decades. Our committee advised federal regulators and other relevant organizations to conduct observational and modeling research to better understand hydrodynamic and ecological processes before, during and after wind farm construction. These studies will be critical for understanding and addressing environmental impacts from offshore wind farm development.
Erin L. Meyer-Gutbrod is Assistant Professor of Earth, Ocean & Environment, University of South Carolina; Douglas Nowacek is Professor of Conservation Technology in Environment and Engineering, Duke University; Eileen E. Hofmann is Professor of Oceanography, Old Dominion University; Josh Kohut is Professor of Marine and Coastal Sciences, Rutgers University. Richard Merrick, former chief science adviser and director of scientific programs at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries, and Kelly Oskvig, National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine director of the study described here, contributed to this article.
The Conversation arose out of deep-seated concerns for the fading quality of our public discourse and recognition of the vital role that academic experts could play in the public arena. Information has always been essential to democracy. It’s a societal good, like clean water. But many now find it difficult to put their trust in the media and experts who have spent years researching a topic. Instead, they listen to those who have the loudest voices. Those uninformed views are amplified by social media networks that reward those who spark outrage instead of insight or thoughtful discussion. The Conversation seeks to be part of the solution to this problem, to raise up the voices of true experts and to make their knowledge available to everyone. The Conversation publishes nightly at 9 p.m. on FlaglerLive.
Dennis C Rathsam says
Another green screw up by the democrats. First it was Obama with Solindra, millions of dollars wasted on solar pannels, company has gone belly up Here comes Biden, more millions for electric busses, money lost, busses burned up. Now theyve gone belly up too Now the windmill story, & electric cars that the middle class cant afford or want.How many more money will the democrates waste? In stead of helping the American people, and our veterans.
The dude says
In english please? I don’t speak gibberish.
Ray W. says
Hello the dude:
Given that we are less than one year away from a national election, is it fair to anticipate that Dennis C. Rathsam and JimboXYZ, among many others, will become ever more strident in their condemnations of the current administration, however correct or incorrect, however coherent or incoherent, their condemnations may be?
Perhaps it is time to delve into the differing political theories currently posed by our two current political parties. The questions are, as always: Who should rule and why should they rule?
Nearly two years ago, I told Mr. Tristam, as I awaited my turn to testify in an old case, that I had been holding back on several subject matters. In the subject matter of this comment, I have held back because I needed to slowly lay a foundation for the argument. Time has always been my friend and I have no need to rush my beliefs into print.
I choose to start this broader effort with an excellent analysis set forth by I. F. Stone, in his “The Trial of Socrates.” In his Chapter 1, titled “Their Basic Differences”, Mr. Stone explains his view of the philosophical foundation of the Greek ideal of community or city or “polis.”
“To judge only by Plato, one might conclude that Socrates got into trouble with his fellow citizens by exhorting them to virtue, never and endearing occupation. But if we turn away from the Apology for a wider view, we will see that the conflict between Socrates and his native city began because he differed so profoundly from most of his fellow Athenians and, indeed, from the ancient Greeks generally, on three basic philosophical questions. These differences were not mere distant abstractions, of no concern to ordinary mortals, but challenged the very foundations of the self-government they enjoyed.
“The first and most fundamental disagreement was on the nature of the human community. Was it, as Greeks would have said, a polis — a free city? Or was it, as Socrates so often said, a herd?
“A good place to start is with one of the most famous observations of antiquity — Aristotle’s remark, at the very beginning of his treatise of politics, that man is a political animal.
“The English translation is unfortunate. The English words political animal are, it is true, an exact and literal rendering of the Greek term, zoon politicon. But in English this conjures up the picture of a ward heeler who spends his life in the seedy chores of the modern political machine.
“The Greek word polis, or city, and its various derivatives carried very different connotations. To be a polites, a citizen of a polis, was a badge of honor. It implied that the citizen had a right to debate, and a right to vote on, the decisions that affected his life and that of his city.
“A polis meant something more to the ancient Greeks than ‘city’ does to us in a modern nation-state. It did not mean merely to live in an urban rather than a rural area. The polis was an independent and sovereign ‘state’ in the full modern sense. The polis made law within its borders, and — outside them — it made war or peace as it saw fit.
“But when Aristotle began his Politics with the proposition that man was a ‘political animal,’ he was not concerned with the polis in its outward manifestations as a sovereign body but in the inner relations that made the city possible. Aristotle’s point was that man alone had the qualities that made a communal existence possible, and for him as for most Greeks the highest form of such koinonia – literally ‘community’ — was the polis. It was made possible, Aristotle said, because of all the animals man alone had the logos. The logos was more than the power of speech. It also denoted reason and morality.
“There are, as Aristotle observed, other social or gregarious forms of life. Certain insects lead a communal existence in hives and certain wild animals live together in herds. But it is man’s ‘special distinction from the other animals that he alone has perception of good and bad and of the just and unjust.’ It is this sense of justice that gives man his social instinct, his ‘impulse’ as Aristotle calls it, to a social life, and makes man ‘a political animal in a greater measure than any bee or any gregarious animal.’
“When Aristotle said that the polis exists ‘by nature,’ he meant that it springs from the nature of man, from an intrinsic sense of justice.
“For the Greeks, polis had a special characteristic that distinguished it from other forms of human community. It was, as Aristotle says, ‘an association of free men,’ as distinguished from such other and earlier forms of association as the family, which was ruled by its patriarch, or monarchy, or the relation of master and slave. The polis governed itself. The ruled were the rulers. As Aristotle described it, the citizen ‘takes turns to govern and be governed.’ Whether in oligarchies, where citizenship was restricted, or in democracies like Athens, where all freeborn males were citizens, major offices were filled by elections but many others were filled by lot to give all citizens an equal chance to participate in their government. Every citizen had the right to vote and speak in the assembly where the laws were enacted, and to sit in the jury courts where those laws were applied and interpreted. These were the basic characteristics of Greek politics — the administration of its cities — long before Aristotle described them in the fourth century B.C. They governed the life of Athens in the lifetime of Socrates, and it was with these premises that Socrates and his disciples disagreed.
“The difference was fundamental. Politics in Athens and the Greek city-states generally, as in Rome under the Republic, was a kind of two-party class struggle. Both sides agreed that the city should be governed by its citizens. They divided over how wide that citizenship should be. Was citizenship to be restricted, as in the oligarchies, or widespread, as in the democracies? Was the city to be ruled by the few or the many, which also meant the rich or the poor? But for both sides, politics – the very life of the city — lay in self-government, and to oppose self-government was to be not just antidemocratic by antipolitical. This is how Socrates looked to most of his contemporaries.
“Socrates was neither an oligarch nor a democrat. He stood apart from either side. His ideal, as we see it variously expressed in both Xenophon and Plato and reflected in what we know of the other Socratics, was rule neither by the few nor the many but by — as he put it in Xenophon’s Memorabilia — ‘one who knows.’ This must have looked to his contemporaries as a reversion to kingship in its most absolute form. And to advocate kingship was to set oneself wholly in opposition to the polis. In fifth- and fourth-century Athens, advocacy of kingship must have looked as quirky as a monarchist political party would in twentieth-century America — too quaint and eccentric even to be alarming.
“Neither the few nor the many wanted to revive kingship, wanted to give up control over the government of their own lives. They differed bitterly — and fought numerous miniature civil wars — over who should be counted in the citizenry. But they agreed that the citizens should rule their city.
“The controversy is not so comfortably ancient as it may at first seem. The twentieth-century has seen — and still sees — new forms of one-man rule in the totalitarianisms of right and left. Indeed, the germ of totalitarianism is already evident in the Socrates formulated his theory of government in the Memorabilia, the earliest and fullest expression of his views.
“Socrates would have argued that he was proposing not kingship in its ancient form but a new kind of one-man rule, the basis of an ideal society. In the Memorabilia, Socrates set himself up as an opponent of all forms of existing government. He itemized — and rejected — them one by one.
“‘Kings and rulers’ he said, ‘are not those who hold the sceptre,’ the symbol of high office, which they often claimed to have received from Zeus himself. That took care of monarchy in its conventional form. Nor are they, he continued, ‘those who are chosen by the multitude.” That took care of democracy. ‘Nor those on whom the lot falls” — that rejected public officials chosen by lot. ‘[N]or those who owe their power to force or deception’ — that took care of ‘tyrants.’ The true or ideal ‘kings and rulers’ are ‘those who know how to rule.'” (pgs. 9-12)
If Stone’s interpretation of Socratic thought is accurate, what he is saying is that one of our political parties is not looking to install some form of totalitarian or monarchical rule in order to stay in power, as so many Flaglerlive readers insist, but instead it is trying to install a new form of government, one that has never been tried before, which is rule by those who know how to rule. When former President Trump declared to all who would listen that “only I can fix things”, he was not arguing that royal accident of birth or the exercise of power or force by tyranny would or should keep him in power; he was telling everyone that he DESERVED to rule, in the Socratic sense. Human beings are not political animals, in Trump’s ideal society, because they do not inherently know how to rule. Just as we listen to the plane’s captain whenever we fly, because the captain is an expert on flying and because we don’t know how to pilot the aircraft, we must listen to Trump, because he is an expert on governing and we don’t know how to govern ourselves. If Trump deserves to rule solely because he is the one who knows how to rule, the corollary, as Stone put it, is that the rest should obey. This, in my opinion, is why David Brooks, the widely acclaimed and ardent conservative columnist, argues that Trump uttering that particularly worded phrase was the most unconservative thing Trump ever could have said.
Does this idea of rule of the human community by “the one who knows how to rule” pose an existential threat to the foundation of government that we have enjoyed, or hated, for over two centuries, that of the liberal democratic Constitutional republic? Does this new form of government by one who DESERVES to rule fit the interview Russian Federation President Putin gave to a Financial Times reporter many years ago, during which he stated that “liberalism” has become “obsolete?”
Laurel says
Oh, he believes he DESERVES to rule as I’ve never witnessed an individual who is ego only, as is Trump. Darth Vader, the unformed man. There are those who think, make decisions and invent. There are those who want to have someone think for them, and make the decisions and are skeptical of, and often hostile towards inventions. It is the latter group who want Trump.
YankeeExPat says
Dennis; ……….. take off the blinders!
Please take a look around our own community here in Palm coast and observe how many Ford Mustang Mach E’s. Hyundai IONIQ 5’s and 6’s, Rivian trucks, Ford electric F-150’s and any Hybrid cars/ SUV’s you could think of running red lights around town, (“A Palm Coast tradition ..run red ..stop for green”). And in the last six months I challenge you to show me any retail parking lot in Palm Coast, (Walmart, Publix, Dixies, Target) that does have numerous Tesla’s model S’s and Model 3’s parked there. As far as the later…. the Model 3, their popularity has exploded in Palm Coast. You couldn’t cant shake a stick without hitting one.
Ray W. says
According to Cox Automotive, EV sales now comprise 7.9% of overall “total industry” sales in the U.S., up from 6.1% a year earlier. Total sales for the year are expected to break the one million mark this month, a record.
Horse and buggy owners have been known to loudly decry the news!
Tired of it says
As for helping veterans…it was the Republicans inCongress who nixed the plan to expand veterans benefits.
How many electric busses have burned up? Cite specifics. If you think Ev’s aren’t selling like hotcakes you haven’t look around Palm Coast lately.
Edith Campins says
https://www.militarytimes.com/opinion/commentary/2023/04/24/proposed-gop-cuts-would-slash-30-billion-from-veterans-spending/
Tom M says
Several articles were written in Barron’s recently noting how many large European investors are backing out of their commitment to finance these farms because of AMERICAN political and just plain old beaurocratic tie ups which are escalating costs and further snarled up by scientists(?) and so called environmentalists causing more problems. Do you want fossil free fuels or not ???
Not a green scene says
The problem with these windmills is that the blades need to be replaced every 3 years or so as does the generator it attaches too, so if you add the cost of replacement of these major components to the fact you now need to load these onto a crane ship and wait for almost dead calm weather window, the value of the amount of energy produced isn’t much after taking these costs into consideration. Now you have these huge navigation Hazards never mind what harm they may or may not do to birds and marine mammals. There is just no substitute for running pipelines from where the oil is pumped out of the ground to where it is refined. I cannot afford a $100,000 ford pickup truck that can only tow a boat 110 miles before you need to find a charger that works, when the ap on a phone also works (Look on you tube for hellish new owner videos i.e.: stranded on their first family trip because they cannot get their new toy to charge). Fords lightning ap is most frustratingly Glitchy reports nearly everyone not sponsored by ford on You tube.
Ray W. says
My father loved to tell of childhood travels from Greensboro to Concord to gather with family for holidays. He claimed that his father always packed a full tire repair kit to fix the inevitable flat tires experienced on the road. Each of the three boys took turns manning the tire pump after my grandfather took the tire off, split the rim, found the puncture in the tube, scuffed and cleaned the region of the puncture, applied the glue, affixed the patch and lit the glue on fire to compete the sealing of the patch, then inspect the inside of the tire to ensure the intruding piece was removed, reinstall the tube, bolt together the rim pieces, remount the tire and then drive until the next flat tire. When I was racing motocross in the 70’s, a punctured tube was not overly common, but it happened. I still have three sets of tire irons of different lengths in my toolboxes. I probably have the box of glue, scuff tool, patches of different sizes somewhere, but it is no longer in the toolboxes.
Teething problems are a normal part of the development process. When I was a crew chief in the AMA endurance roadracing series, one sponsor was an aftermarket piston manufacturer. We ran a double overbore forged piston kit, raising the displacement from 998cc to 1029cc. No problems for over two years. The sponsor developed a 1069cc piston kit. We sent the owner two cylinders. He pressed out the iron liners, bored the aluminum cladding to accept a larger iron liner that was a quadruple overbore size. The power from the new engine was amazing, but the reduced interface between the new larger liner and the head was smaller. We kept experiencing cylinder head gasket leaks that pressurized the cooling system and blew out the coolant. Two races and four blown head gaskets (the race engine in practice and the spare engine in the race) with the kit were enough for us. This after we had finished 23 endurance races in a row without engine problems. Back to the old kits and the problems went away.
Laurel says
Ray W.: As we used to say in the ’60’s, “Right on, man!”
Ray W. says
Hello Not a green scene,
I did what you should have done before you posted your comment. I ran a fact check. USA Today ran an article on the subject of windmill blades, generators and gearboxes. It rated the claim you posted as false. It appears that you were taken for a ride by a malicious internet site. I, too, am gullible from time to time. The answer is intellectual rigor.
Windmill blades are expected to last 20-25 years. Generators are expected to last 15-20 years, though a fairly small percentage have lasted less than that period of time. There were a number of gearbox failures, apparently due to manufacturing defects in the metal of the gears used to raise the generator speed to optimum levels from the slow windmill rotational speeds. While it was not listed as the cause in the article, a rare problem in motorcycle gearboxes occurs when the manufacturer improperly heat treats the metal, making it too brittle; gear teeth shear off after time under load. I am not saying this is what happened to windmill gearboxes. I am saying I have seen the broken gearsets in motorcycle transmissions and know that it is due to improper heat treating. I recall a new sport bike model being released by a Japanese company that had second gears failing left and right at the racetrack. It wasn’t happening to street riders. The company quickly released a redesigned driven gear. The explanation was insufficient oiling under high engine speeds during racing conditions. A different bearing surface that was slightly wider did the trick.
Charlotte DuHamel says
The scientific method requires baseline studies. Since baseline studies were not done, that ship has sailed and no legitimate studies are now possible.