Thank you very much.
Ladies and gentlemen of the committee, thank you for allowing me to join you virtually to offer my experience from the U.S. as you discuss Bill C-49.
My name is Bonnie Brady. I am the executive director of the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association, which represents all gear types of commercial fishermen on Long Island in New York.
In 2003, we became involved with offshore wind, when 100 offshore turbines were slated for our state waters. That project was killed when the real cost of the project to ratepayers was revealed in 2006.
I am here to join the chorus of warnings about offshore wind. No matter what you have been told about Canada being the new Saudi Arabia of wind, there are far more threats lurking ahead from offshore wind to commercial fishing and its coastal communities, your domestic seafood production and infrastructure, mariner safety, national security and the ocean itself. I implore you to not move rapidly without being aware of the pitfalls.
To begin, you must protect commercial fishing, fisheries and benthic habitat by removing fishing grounds from offshore wind lease areas, including where cables are placed. Without having specific language within your fisheries law, and perhaps also in Bill C-49, you may be unwittingly signing an economic death warrant for fishing communities and possibly the ocean's productivity itself.
The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management has had minimal to no contact with commercial fishing experts in the siting process here in the U.S. It only included them after the project design was locked in via state power purchase agreements. Best management practices are a mirage.
The consolidation of federal decision-making power under BOEM means that other agencies have been ignored and fisheries are considered at the last stages of its federal review. By then, alternatives are severely limited by developer and state decisions, even though the lease is in federal waters. Our NOAA fisheries—which is our main regulator, like your DFO—is not a lead agency. As such, it cannot say no to a project. BOEM has full authority.
Federal agencies are instead deferring to multinational or foreign government-owned energy companies, advertising the permanent installation of turbines as solely a good thing for our oceans, and prioritizing build-out goals at the expense of our nation's wild-caught seafood security. By losing access to fishing grounds for multiple fisheries and direct access to ports throughout our coastlines, our entire commercial fishing industry and its infrastructure will be gutted.
As of late, we've seen procurement agreements cancelled, but with new mandates and rebidding right around the corner, development is all but guaranteed, shutting out ways to protect our industry and the environment. As Ms. Lapp mentioned, our only recourse is to sue.
The U.S. has no language to protect or compensate commercial fishermen for the taking of their fishing grounds for offshore wind, unlike Denmark, whose law states, “No obstacles may be placed in the way of legally practiced fishing.” They will tell you that compensation was only because, in Denmark, they closed wind lease areas to fishing and here you won't be prevented. What they won't tell you is that it's dangerous to enter wind farms because marine radar will not work.
Fishermen from Thanet, England, told us the same in 2014. Their 10-metre boats are now forced to travel around the Ørsted-built offshore wind farm to cod grounds much farther from port because the cod are no longer in the lease area. In 2016, we began telling U.S. regulators about false ghost targets on radar, using the example of the Block Island wind farm, which is a small, five-turbine, six-megawatt site off Rhode Island. We were ignored. In the spring of 2022, the National Academy of Sciences corroborated fishermen's long-standing radar interference concerns.
As Ms. Lapp mentioned in earlier testimony, Rhode Island lost the fishing vessel Mistress and two of its three crew in the early hours of New Year's Day in 2019. The U.S. Coast Guard report described clearly that the Sikorsky Jayhawk helicopter that was sent to look for survivors returned to base after arriving offshore, as they were “unable to conduct search due to high winds, low [visibility], hazards (windmills) and low ceiling”.
That's for five turbines far smaller than the more than 3,000-plus U.S. offshore wind turbine planned assault on the Atlantic Ocean.
In 2020, the offshore wind turbine radar mitigation workshop webinars made clear that a one-foot error in ocean current height based on high-frequency radar will become a 24-kilometre error in the search zone for a lost soul. The entire search and rescue operations' SAROPS model, which is used to predict search zones, will be rendered useless.
Another reason that Thanet fishermen must travel farther is that their former fishing grounds, now the Thanet wind farm, are churning up constant underwater sediment plumes up to six kilometres long and over 150 metres wide 24-7, with scour pits up to 40 metres deep behind each turbine. Those sediment plumes can be seen from space. I'm not kidding. NASA did a paper on it in 2014.
We do know, through European research, that offshore wind farms warm the sea surface temperature, mimicking climate change. They affect ocean circulation patterns, produce a substantial loss of wind for up to 60 miles past a lease area and impact upwelling and downwelling, which feed the ocean and all of its denizens.
Please do not rush forward as the U.S. has. If you do, you risk it all.
I look forward to any questions the committee may have.