Thank you, committee members, for the opportunity to speak today.
My name is Meghan Lapp, and I am the fisheries liaison for Seafreeze, a Rhode Island commercial fishing company. We own five federally permitted commercial fishing vessels and two shoreside facilities.
I'm here to warn Canada against making the same mistakes that the United States has made in expediting offshore wind development. In our country, the government process has ignored our concerns, and as a result we have been forced into litigation as our only recourse. That is what will happen in Canada if the Canadian government follows in the footsteps of its American counterpart.
The proponents of offshore wind will claim that urgent action is necessary at all costs to prevent climate change. However, even U.S. government documents conclude that the proposed wind projects would have no measurable influence on climate change, and that the construction of offshore wind facilities is not expected to impact climate change. Therefore, the purported benefits do not outweigh the negative impacts.
Offshore wind development is the single greatest threat to the continued existence of commercial fishing on the U.S. east coast. Even U.S. government documents state that some fisheries “may not be able to safely operate and harvest the resource” in the wind development areas, and that, “In this situation, a large portion of annual income for vessels may be inaccessible during operations”. The official record of decision approving one offshore wind farm acknowledged, “it is likely that the entire...area will be abandoned by commercial fisheries due to difficulties with navigation.”
Our vessels will not be able to safely operate in a wind farm. Trawl gear such as ours can snag on the underwater infrastructure of the turbines and cables, and in a worst-case scenario cause the vessel to capsize. In the words of wind developer DONG Energy, now Ørsted, and a U.K. fisheries information agency, “Loss of gear, fishing time and catch can result if a trawler snags a subsea structure and there is serious risk of loss of life.” An analysis prepared for the Dutch government depicts the consequences of fishing in an offshore wind farm with a trawl vessel snagging on a wind farm cable, in which the vessel ends up at the bottom of the ocean. All U.S. farms will become de facto exclusion areas for fishing vessels such as ours.
Deconfliction of leases and fishing grounds, with a priority on protecting commercial fishing grounds from any offshore wind development, is the only solution. Canada has the opportunity now to ensure the safety and protection of its fisheries.
Safe transit through wind farms will also be impossible for fishing vessels and other forms of marine vessel traffic. Offshore wind turbines interfere with all classes of marine radar on which our vessels rely, especially at night, in inclement weather and in the fog. In 2022, the National Academies of Sciences released a report entitled, “Wind Turbine Generator Impacts to Marine Vessel Radar”, confirming years of issues I have raised to BOEM—the U.S. federal agency in charge of offshore wind leasing—and the U.S. Coast Guard.
The National Academies actually quoted part of my U.S. Coast Guard comment submissions in the final report, as well as many, if not all, the studies I had previously submitted to the coast guard and BOEM—which they ignored in favour of offshore wind expansion. The study identified areas of potential future research, but no immediate solutions. Prior to even the 2022 report, the U.S. Coast Guard had admitted via correspondence that its own vessels would be impacted by offshore wind radar interference, yet the coast guard does not conduct an independent radar interference analysis, even on its own vessel capabilities, and instead leaves this to the developer.
More recently, the U.S. Air Force requested that Congress enact legislation to prevent construction of wind farms within two nautical miles of the nation's nuclear missile silos, specifically due to the need to fly helicopters in those areas. According to the Air Force, wind turbines create both physical obstacles and turbulence that make wind farms “really dangerous...to fly into” with a helicopter. The coast guard uses helicopters as a primary means of search and rescue. If the U.S. Air Force cannot fly helicopters in wind farms, neither can the coast guard.
An official U.S. Coast Guard transcript regarding a fishing vessel sinking off Rhode Island in 2019 states six times that one of the reasons for aborting the helicopter search for potential survivors, in addition to poor weather conditions, were hazards in the area, which were identified as the Block Island wind farm turbines. Two out of three men died that day. There are only five Block Island turbines, not the thousands planned coast-wide. Vessels don't sink in good weather. They sink in bad weather when visibility is poor, when vessel radar needs to work and helicopters need to fly low. The fact is that a major mission of the U.S. Coast Guard, that of search and rescue, will be compromised due to offshore wind interference with its own vessels' radar and helicopter operations, yet it has still not conducted any comprehensive assessment of the level of reduction in its own capabilities due to offshore wind, despite the fact that offshore wind construction is ongoing in U.S. waters.
I implore Canada: Do not do what we are doing. Commercial fisheries are a true renewable resource industry that should not be cast aside for a 30-year project. You can't eat electricity.
Thank you for the opportunity to testify.