About Impacts
The Challenge
Wind energy site selection is typically driven by economic factors. By these measures a good site minimizes construction and operating costs and maximizes returns from energy production. As far as the public is concerned, they may be kept informed about a project as it is planned or be invited to submit comments. But, public preferences and opinions are rarely, if ever, incorporated into the siting process in any substantial way. The frustrations expressed about this approach and its outcomes prove an important point: Public acceptance is an essential factor in the feasibility of any wind energy project.
Your Role in Offshore Wind Site Selection
The Vineyard Power offshore wind site selection process was created with this in mind. Our goal is to meaningfully incorporate the opinions and preferences of our members and the community to identify sites that are both economically viable and publicly acceptable. We have invited members to take surveys, join us at community forums, and to otherwise share their input in any way they would like. From this, we have created a set of siting criteria which are the basis for describing and comparing the suitability of potential sites. Together, these criteria combine measures of economic viability with public acceptance.
The final input of member preferences will be through a forthcoming survey aimed at assessing the relative importance of these siting criteria. This will help our members to select a location that appropriately balances all factors. This website will help you to prepare for this decision by learning more about each criterion.
Many of you will also want learn more about the potential impacts associated with offshore wind energy development. The section entitled Learn More provides access to detailed information and research to help you better understand these impacts. You will find summaries of potential impacts on different resources associated with each phase of development. Information also ranges from multi-year studies of offshore wind farms in Europe to exhaustive baseline ecological studies in the United States. Links to specific research exploring potential impacts to birds and marine mammals are also provided.
The more we learn as a cooperative, the better we will be able to identify sites that benefit the island and preserve the qualities that make it unique and special.
Understanding Potential Impacts
The activities associated with building, operating, and decommissioning offshore wind projects can impact the physical, biological, and cultural resources of the surrounding area. Years of experience with offshore wind farms in Europe and land-based wind in the U.S. have proven that appropriate siting practices can mitigate adverse impacts to these resources. We will take all necessary steps to ensure that we do the same here.
Despite this, we recognize that some areas, for one reason or another, are simply not appropriate for development. The Vineyard Power Visual Impact Survey helped to confirm this. The majority of members who took the survey expressed the view that any turbines within 6 miles are unacceptable. As a corollary, a higher percentage of members felt that turbines are appropriate beyond 10 miles.
Clearly this alone doesn’t define what is appropriate. It is simply one important piece of information that will be considered together with others such as the locations of important wildlife habitats and commercial fishing areas. How then do we proceed to weigh and evaluate all these bits of information to arrive at a decision?
Guidelines For A Good Decision
To start, we will draw upon a set of professionally developed, science-based guidelines that provide a framework for collecting information, evaluating risk, and making informed siting decisions. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Wind Turbine Advisory Committee Recommended Guidelines were developed to encourage good decision making on the location, design, and operation of wind projects.
The Guidelines were developed to prevent adverse impacts to wildlife and their habitats while allowing for the development of land-based wind energy resources. The Guidelines can also be applied to offshore wind. The organization and use of the guidelines are described as follows:
The Committees Guidelines are founded upon a “tiered approach” for assessing potential impacts to wildlife and their habitats. The tiered approach is an iterative decision making-process for collecting information in increasing detail, quantifying the possible risks of proposed wind energy projects to wildlife and habitats, and evaluating those risks to make siting, construction, and operation decisions.
Subsequent tiers build upon issues raised and efforts undertaken in the previous tiers. At each tier, a set of questions is provided to help the developer identify potential problems, associated with each phase of the project, and to guide its decision process. The tiered approach is designed to assess the risks of project development by formulating questions that relate to site-specific conditions regarding potential species and habitat impacts.
Our Site Selection Process
The Vineyard Power Site Selection Process aligns well with tiers 1 and 2 which specify the inventory and use of existing data to screen multiple sites. This means that we start by considering every option and gather all of the available data to learn more. Many sites will be ruled out immediately. For those remaining, we evaluate the available information, identify missing or incomplete data, and list concerns to be explored in greater detail in subsequent tiers. The same process is then applied at a finer scale for individual sites. These steps are summarized in the table below:
The Offshore Wind Site Selection Map Viewer provides access to map layers and information related to our siting criteria and describes how each potential site performs against them. But before we can use this information to make a final determination about which sites are most suitable, we need one more piece of information. The Vineyard Power siting criteria together represent the factors that are important to members and the community. The priority of their importance relative to one another is also important. This determines how much influence or weight each criterion exerts when we combine them to determine the overall suitability of each potential site.
This final step will produce a list of sites ranked according to the preferences of members. This list will be accompanied by the data which was used to determine its final rank. This provides a necessary starting point to the discussions and deliberations that will take place among Vineyard Power members. Ultimately, it is the foundation for an informed decision to select an offshore wind site that is both economically viable and publicly acceptable.
Beyond the membership it will help the Island and others to better understand appropriate offshore wind siting practices and demonstrate the use of community preferences in a participatory site selection process.
Beyond the Vineyard Power Site Selection Process
Once a site has been selected it will be subject to extensive study and review as specified under the National Environmental Policy Act. During this process site specific studies will be conducted to quantify potential impacts in as much detail as possible before any final approval or permit is granted.
You can read more about this process here.
