Second wind farm off Rhode Island moving closer to reality

        Alex Kuffner reports for
The Providence Journal:
A second wind farm proposed in waters off Rhode Island cleared a major hurdle in January when the public utility on Long Island approved a long-term contract to buy power from developer Deepwater Wind.
The board of trustees of the Long Island Power Authority unanimously approved a 20-year agreement to purchase energy from the 90-megawatt South Fork Wind Farm, which would be triple the size of the demonstration project off Block Island that Providence-based Deepwater completed last fall.
Deepwater Wind is among three companies seeking to develop large-scale wind turbine farms in leased federal waters about 15 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard. The company announced a downtown New Bedford office last September.
The company’s Massachusetts vice president is Matthew Morrissey, a former economic development director for New Bedford and the first director of the city’s Wind Energy Center, formed in 2013.
The five-turbine Block Island Wind Farm is the first offshore wind farm in the United States.
A proposed $740-million array of up to 15 turbines that would be built for LIPA in Rhode Island Sound is poised now to be the second, with a projected completion date of 2022.
The deal comes at an uncertain time for offshore wind. Although President Donald Trump has pledged support for an all-of-the-above energy strategy, he has also disparaged the aesthetics of wind turbines and there is concern about the future of a federal investment tax credit that is important to the industry.
Deepwater CEO Jeffrey Grybowski said he is confident that the project will qualify for the tax credit and move forward.
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Great White Father Trump ready to grab more tribal land

 

The deputy secretary of the Army will grant the final permit needed for completion of the Dakota Access Pipeline, the Army declared in a court filing Tuesday, clearing the final bureaucratic hurdle standing in the way of the massive infrastructure project.
The Army’s intention to grant a 30-year easement under Lake Oahe, which came in a court filing over an ongoing federal environmental review of the controversial project, was immediately hailed by congressional Republicans and decried by members of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and other opponents of the pipeline. In documents filed with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Army officials indicated that they were terminating a plan to prepare an environmental-impact statement on how the pipeline would affect land and water along its 1,170-mile route.
The move, coming two weeks after President Trump instructed the Army Corps of Engineers to conduct an expedited review of the easement, underscores the new administration’s intent to spur infrastructure development and support the fossil fuel industry. Both during the presidential campaign and since taking office, Trump has spoken of the need to accelerate domestic energy production and the construction of pipelines that can bring oil and gas to market.
While couched in dry language–the letter from Deputy Secretary of the Army Paul D. Cramer to Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.) detailed the 7.37 acres the pipeline would traverse on federal property–the easement marks a major blow to activists who had come from across the country last year to gather on the Great Plains and mark the land as the site where a tribe and its allies would defy the federal government. Those opponents argued the project–which crosses four states and would carry crude oil from the rich shale oil basins of western North Dakota to the pipeline networks and refineries in the Midwest–could damage the environment and disturb ancient burial grounds.
Construction cannot begin until the actual easement is granted, which Cramer wrote will be given to the project’s sponsor Energy Transfer Partners no later than Wednesday afternoon. The 1,100-mile stretch running underneath Lake Oahe is one of the final parts to be built, and it will take between 60 and 80 days from the start of construction before the pipeline will become operational.
In the meantime confrontations between activists and law enforcement, who have already clashed on the proposed site of the project, could flare up once again. While the Standing Rock Sioux tribe has urged its supporters to go home due to worsening weather conditions, a few hundred protesters have remained. Last week, authorities arrested 74 activists who had decamped from the tribal reservation to land owned by Energy Transfer Partners.
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Oceanfront owners ask judge to block Jersey shore dunes

Rock wall designed to protect oceanfront in Bay Head, NJ 
Wayne Parry reports for The Associated Press:

A group of oceanfront homeowners in New Jersey is saying thanks, but no thanks, to the government and its money.

The residents on Monday asked a state judge to exempt them from a protective sand dune project, arguing that the millions they’ve spent from their own pockets on a rock wall — and the millions more they will spend on its upkeep — will do the job better than what the government proposes.

The homeowners have been pushing back for nearly three years against Republican Gov. Chris Christie’s plan to erect protective sand dunes along most of New Jersey’s 127-mile coast. Among them is Lawrence Bathgate II, who was the national Republican finance chairman under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, and raised money for both of George W. Bush’s presidential campaigns and Jeb Bush’s 2016 primary campaign.

More than a dozen residents from Bay Head and neighboring areas asked Superior Court Judge Marlene Lynch Ford to block the state from seizing strips of their land for the project. She is the same judge who last year upheld the state’s right to seize land from resistant homeowners for the dune project, but agreed to consider what might be special circumstances in Bay Head, where parts of the shoreline have been protected by a man-made rock wall since the 1800s.



The homeowners have spent $5 million on the wall between their homes and the ocean, and say the government’s proposed project is wasteful and unneeded in their area. Their homes lie in an area that was devastated by Superstorm Sandy in 2012.


“This is a system that has not cost the government a penny, and it is a system that has worked,” said Anthony Della Pelle, an attorney for the homeowners. “The only people who it would protect are the people in this courtroom today — and they don’t want it. That is the biggest irony of all.”


The residents want to be excluded from the $128 million, 14-mile project, nearly two miles of which would be built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in front of the existing rock wall.


Stephen Eisdorfer, an attorney for the state Department of Environmental Protection, said the dunes need to be “continuous, uniform and gapless” in order to work properly. 


The state has an interest not only in protecting lives and property, but in maintaining wide beaches for public use that “are part of what makes New Jersey New Jersey.”


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8 cool things you should know about NJ beach rebuilding

Daniel Nee of Brick Shorebeat provide information about the upcoming beach replenishment program in NJ:

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers project is expected to begin within the next two months. It will change our local beaches forever, with vegetated dunes and engineered beaches that will be better protected during storms.

But what about the details? Before the $90 million project begins, we thought we’d fill you in on a few facts, courtesy of the Corps itself.

1. The project will send millions of cubic yards of sand through pipes, miles out in the ocean, right onto your street’s beach! The project, once fully completed, will cover approximately 14 miles of coastline along the Barnegat Peninsula in the communities of Point Pleasant Beach, Bay Head, Mantoloking, Brick Township, Toms River Township, Lavallette, Seaside Heights, Seaside Park, and Berkeley Township.

More than 11 million cubic yards of sand will be dredged from approved borrow areas and pumped through a series of pipes onto the beaches of the municipalities. Last summer, we took a tour of one of the dredge boats working the Long Beach Island project to get an up-close view as to how things work.

The dredge boat Liberty Island, off Long Beach Island, NJ. (Photo: Daniel Nee)


2. Where is the sand coming from? Will it match the color and grain size of the existing sand? The sand will be coming from several offshore “borrow areas.” The identified borrow areas are chosen for their compatibility of the sand with the existing sand on the beaches. The Army Corps goes through an extensive process (they also work with the state Department if Environmental Protection) to find these sites and gain the environmental approvals to use them.

The process includes physical sampling as the Corps seeks to closely match the grain size to the “native” sand on the beach. Sometimes, the sand pumped onto the beach may initially appear to be a darker color as it has been buried unexposed to sunlight. Once exposed to the elements, this disappears quickly and the material will match the existing sand. In a previous project on Long Beach Island, the sand began to appear white (like the sand that was there before it) after about a week or so. 

3. Yes, the sand is designed to erode after construction. Because the Corps cannot reliably place material under water in the surf zone, officials know that the profile will undergo an initial adjustment to reach the natural equilibrium profile of the beach.

“We expect Mother Nature to erode some of the berm in the first year, which is why we build a post-construction template much wider than the designed template,” the Corps states in a fact sheet on the project. In addition, the project includes scheduled regular “periodic nourishment” every 4 years to add more sand into the system to maintain the design profile over the life of the project.

4. Dune crossovers will replace cut-throughs to access the beach. The Corps’ contract includes the construction of “dune crossovers,” which are built over top of the dune as opposed to “through the dune.” This way, the entire coastline is protected and there is no place where water can funnel its way through during a storm. These are typically built in the same locations as existing access points.

Additionally, the Corps is building ADA-accessible dune crossovers and vehicular dune crossovers in certain locations based on coordination with the non-federal sponsor (NJDEP) and the local municipalities. The pedestrian crossovers are topped with a hard-pack clay-like material, which is easier to walk on. The crossovers include fencing to assist with keeping people from walking on the dunes, which damages the stabilizing dune grass.

A dune crossover on a vehicle access beach in Surf City, N.J. (Photo: Daniel Nee)

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Republicans in Congress hurry to slash oil and gas rules

Eric Lipton reports for The New York Times:

The document carried the title “A Roadmap to Repeal,” a concise list of Obama administration environmental regulations that a Koch brothers-backed group was pressing President Trump and Congress to quickly reverse after Inauguration Day.

It was a tally of rules that energy industry executives and lobbyists had waged a futile fight against for eight years, donating millions of dollars to lawmakers who vowed to help block them, filing lawsuits to try to overturn them and hiring experts to generate reports that questioned the need for them.

But in a flurry of activity this past week, Congress did what Charles G. and David H. Koch — who own a conglomerate that sells hundreds of products, including gasoline, jet fuel and coal — and other industry leaders had been asking for.

Using a rarely invoked law, the Republican-controlled Congress nullified a measure intended to curb the venting of gas wells on federal lands, and began the process of rolling back other regulations, including one enacted to limit damage that coal mines cause to streams — each items on the “Roadmap to Repeal.”

On Friday, with his own executive orders, Mr. Trump took up two more items on the list, including a call to rewrite major provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act, legislation crafted by the Obama administration and passed by Congress in response to the 2008 financial meltdown.

Not since the Reagan administration has Washington moved so quickly to roll back or nullify so many federal regulations, one of the clearest signs of an abrupt shift of power in a government now under one-party control that has flipped the script of winners and losers.

“It is a big, fat victory, after all this time,” said Luke Popovich, a vice president at the National Mining Association, an industry trade group.

A three-way alliance has now been formed among Congress, the Trump administration and industries that struggled to reverse what they saw as an out-of-control rush to regulate by the Obama administration.

This new alignment of power is causing alarm among not only environmental groups but also other — mostly liberal — advocates who have spent much of the past eight years pushing for new rules to cover Wall Street banks, broadband providers, teacher preparation requirements, prepaid credit cards and even companies that sell high-calorie foods in vending machines.

All of these measures, and many others, now stand a chance of being reversed, watered down or blocked.

“For the last several years, whenever Congress would concoct some way to roll back a rule protecting clean air or clean water or undermine the fight against climate change, we always felt confident as we had an adult in charge at the White House,” said Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, an environmental group. “Now, what used to be a wish list of the oil and coal and gas industry has become the to-do list for Congress and the White House.”


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Not since the Reagan administration has Washington moved so quickly to roll back or nullify so many federal regulations, one of the clearest signs of an abrupt shift of power in a government now under one-party control that has flipped the script of winners and losers.
“It is a big, fat victory, after all this time,” said Luke Popovich, a vice president at the National Mining Association, an industry trade group.

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NJ lawmakers fail to advance water testing legislation

Tom Johnson reports for NJ Spotlight:
The state’s failure to establish drinking-water standards for a range of toxic contaminants, some recommended a dozen years ago, came under harsh scrutiny and criticism from legislators yesterday.
Nevertheless, the Senate Budget and Appropriations Committee held a bill to require the Department of Environmental Protection to adopt new standards for 16 substances, largely on the urging of a top agency executive.
The outcome disappointed environmentalists who have been lobbying for action on the contaminants for years. They had hoped to press the Legislature to force the DEP to act, especially in the wake of reports of lead in drinking water in schools and hospitals, chromium in more than 100 water systems, and other toxics in supplies in South Jersey.
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