Could Trump Use National Security Measures to Block Offshore Wind Projects?
https://restoration-news.com/could-trump-use-national-security-measures-to-block-offshore-wind-projects
By Kevin Mooney
Excerpt:
Enemy submarines and drones could exploit points of vulnerability, experts warn.
Offshore wind projects could potentially enable foreign adversaries to hide submarines in U.S. territorial waters and penetrate U.S. air defenses, according to national security and energy policy analysts.
For this reason alone, they would like to see President Donald Trump’s administration pull the plug on projects up and down the East Coast located near to where military exercises take place. The U.S. Air Force and Navy have in the past expressed concern over how wind farms might impact radar and sonar operations to the point where they compromise defensive and offensive capabilities.
The Trump administration seems to be listening.
Officials have already reversed at least some of the prior approvals President Joe Biden’s administration extended to offshore wind plans. Trump’s January executive order called for a temporary cessation and immediate review of federal wind leasing and permitting practices. The decision dealt a blow to several projects that were either already in motion or in the planning stages.
Last month, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) operating under Trump’s Interior Department explicitly cited national security concerns when it halted “all ongoing activities related to” the Revolution Wind project off the coast of Rhode Island and Connecticut. The BOEM order letter said the agency “is seeking to address concerns related to the protection of national security interests of the United States and prevention of interference with reasonable uses of the exclusive economic zone, the high seas, and the territorial seas.”
In New Jersey, the Atlantic Shores Offshore Wind project has also come to a halt largely in response to legal pressure from Save Long Beach Island (LBI), a grassroots conservation group that includes homeowners, residents, and business owners. The Atlantic Shores project, a partnership between Shell New Energies US and the French-owned EDF Renewables North America, had envisioned building up to 200 wind turbines positioned as close as eight miles off the coast of Long Beach Island (LBI), Brigantine, and Atlantic City in southern New Jersey.
Save LBI also cited national security among its long list of concerns in a new study released in June critiquing offshore wind. Bob Stern, the president of Save LBI, and an engineer who previously managed environmental reviews for the U.S Department of Energy, has sent letters to environmental groups asking them to reconsider their prior support for offshore wind based on the findings in the SAVE LBI report.
NORAD Air Defense Under Pressure from Offshore Wind
The air defense systems located in Gibbsboro, New Jersey and Riverhead, New York—all part of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD)—are of particular concern.
“Possibly, the offshore wind turbines could create corridors for drones to come into our airspace undetected,” Stern told Restoration News in an interview. “So, we are just not talking about the environmental and economic damage, which is all very real, there’s also a national security risk with offshore wind.”
SAVE LBI cites a BOEM study that analyzes the impact the Empire Wind project off the coast of New York could have on the Riverhead Radars. The federal agency determined that “smaller aircraft, which might include drones, would not be detected at lower heights above the turbines.” BOEM also found that “return signals from smaller aircraft at higher elevations, or from larger aircraft, would be detected but obscured by the presence of numerous false targets created by the turbine operation.”
In New Jersey, the height of the blades for the proposed Atlantic Shores project are particularly problematic, SAVE LBI explains, because these blades would be “within line-of-sight of and will interfere with” radar operations at military bases in Gibbsboro, the McGuire Air Force Base, and the Atlantic City Airport Surveillance Radar. The impacts on radar from the offshore wind would, the SAVE LBI report says, “include clutter resulting in a partial loss of primary target detection and a number of false primary targets over and in the immediate vicinity of the proposed WTGs [wind turbine generators].”
…
The Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) and other free market outfits filed suit against the federal government and Dominion Energy, arguing the Virginia wind plan violates the Endangered Species Act. The New Jersey and Virginia suits both build on “Save the Whales” campaigns that invoke studies showing how offshore wind harms marine life.
CFACT president Craig Rucker told Restoration News each wind tower off the Virginia coast would be taller than the Washington Monument with turbine blades longer than a football field. He describes his group as a “Greenpeace of the Right” devoted to “free market environmentalism.” He views the grassroots conservation efforts aimed at saving whales, and other marine species, as a potential gamechanger.
“I find it interesting the way the large environmental activist groups are only concerned about whales when it comes to Navy sonars, and other U.S. military exercise that boost our national security,” Rucker observed. “But when it comes to offshore wind, they don’t care about the whales at all. In fact, they are actively supporting these environmentally degrading wind turbines that studies show threaten whale populations and that are responsible for an increasing number of whale deaths. I think it’s obvious who the real conservationists are and it’s not the big green groups.”