Biden Admin Urges Change in Fishing Practices to Save Endangered Whales
U.S. commercial fishing practices must change to prevent the extinction of North Atlantic right whales, the administration of President Joe Biden said on Thursday, as it prepares a list of new regulations to prevent whale entanglements in lobster and crab gear.
The scientific assessment from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s fisheries unit is a milestone in finalizing a handful of proposed reforms of commercial fishermen mainly intended to reduce the amount of vertical rope in whale habitat.
The lobster industry, centered in Maine, has said it is willing to make changes to protect the whales if necessary, but argues that they have seen little evidence their gear is to blame for whale deaths.
Vineyard Wind offshore project receives federal approval compositesworld.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from compositesworld.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The United States Secretary of the Interior has announced approval of the construction and operation of the Vineyard Wind project the first large-scale, offshore wind project in the United States. Vineyard Wind 1 is an 800 MW project located 15 miles off the coast of Martha s Vineyard and will be the first commercial scale offshore wind project in the United States. The project will generate electricity for more than 400,000 homes and businesses in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, create 3,600 Full Time Equivalent (FTE) job years over the life of the project, save ratepayers $1.4 billion over the first 20 years of operation and is expected to reduce carbon emissions by more than 1.6 million tons per year.
“Receiving this final major federal approval means the jobs, economic benefits and clean energy revolution associated with the Vineyard Wind 1 project can finally come to fruition. It’s been a long road to get to this point,” he added.
Since 2017, the Vineyard Wind 1 project has been through an unprecedented and exhaustive public review process that generated more than 30,000 public comments, more than 90% of which supported the project. The Construction and Operations Plan (COP) was reviewed by more than two dozen federal, state, and local agencies over the course of more than three and a half years.
The project design includes the GE Haliade-X, with a capacity of 13MW. The larger turbine capacity has allowed the project to reduce the total number of turbines from 108 to 62 while still delivering a total capacity of 800MW to Massachusetts customers. The turbine layout, which features consistent spacing of one nautical mile between turbines, was endorsed by the United Stat