The environmental and ecological impacts of ocean windpower extraction and diversion.

How do floating offshore wind energy diversion  arrays affect  the natural energetics of the Gulf of Maine?   How could those changes, if any  affect the Gulf of Maine's  biota, which relies on those windborne energies for their survival - at multiple life stages?   

  

The known unknowns are knowable. We know a lot about water movement in the GOM, as the map of scientific drifter buoy trajectories, deployed between 1988 and 2007.  Colors = different drift buoy paths.  

An offshore wind rush that fails to take note of  and answer them  could have consequensces that far outweigh  the consumer value of the diverted energy piped ashore into the Grid 

Will we spend the time and political capital to dispassionately address these  questions? This requires  

 (1) a disinterested review of the impacts that these  chronic "energy sinks", which these arrays essentially are), would have on the stability of the water column within waters passing through the geographic site of the floating windturbine array.

(2) studies equally thoroughly examining the effect of the 100+ mile long wind shadows of reduced energy water trailing beyond each turbine within the its floating array,  after they shear the seawind  entering the array of most of its energy before it reached the water's surface. 

These two issues should be informed by data flowing from the small but growing number of operating floating wind turbine arrays in the waters off other continents, and from those presently under construction.

For these impacts are entirely predictable if one considers the 1st Law of Thermodynamics, which notes that  when energy passes out of a system, the departed system's internal energy changes.    All in accordance with the Law of Conservation of Energy:  that energy can neither be created nor destroyed - only converted from one form  to another.   Ocean wind turbines transform kinetic wind to electrons.

 sent ashore to human power grids. 

I find most offshore wind boosters  well intentioned, by actually or purposely ignorant of physical oceanography.  For them  wind energy is a wonderful  totally free energy supply.  Magic energy!   So magical that, no matter how much turbines  rob a limited natural energy system  (an ocean water current) of its motive power and ship it ashore,  that current is unaffected!  It is thanks to the grace of    _________  (insert favorite Diety or Dieties)

But, as noted above,  floating wind turbines actually operate according to the limits imposed by the 1st law of Thermodynamics and the Law of Conservation of Energy.     

Questions that want answering:

Does diverting ocean wind energy from the sea surface causes chronic fragmentation and decelleration of water currents that, so modified, may or may no longer transport the Maine coast's larval lobsters and other organisms to their millenia-old destinations?      

Can the  loss of naturally produced energy diverted away from the water column and  the impact of this energy drop on the Ekman Transfer-powered movement of wind energy into the water column, be  accurately  calculated?     If so, could such  calculations be  part of the earliest preliminary review process for determining the ecological safety of floating offshore wind applications?

 By this we eliminate, at the starting block, those proposals with a predictable adverse effect on the currents that  drive the fisheries and  marine mammals of the Gulf of Maine.  

Those sites that survive the no-harm cut?   We may be able to isolate  locations where the adverse impacts WILL be negligible. Or even places where an array's energy parasitism might ameliorate  a climate change wrought disruption of a current?  Stranger thingss have happened.

Why is this difficult? It should be an easy calculation to determine extent of  loss of naturally transferred kinetic energy, diverted away from the water column  via Ekman Transfer, relative to the tune of as many megawatts as are sent to land.

But of course this is a plutocracy now. Now ENGOs like Conservation Law Foundation have become (presumably well paid  if  embarassingly  hypocritical)  shills  for Big Energy industries.  CLF even scrubbed its website and wikepedia page of  its own proud history  of agressively  defending nature  against Power with litigatio,education and negotiation.   CLF 2.0 now  promotes its financial backers goals. For the sad fact is  that when you, like the Conservation Law Foundation,  are  become a corporate person with a $26+ million dollar annual  payroll and overhead to meet, you bow to Big Money or you  fall.   CLF is a victim of its own success.

So a replacement is necessary, thouigh outside the bounds of this  essay. Decentralized defense of the Gulf of Maine, while piecemeal, will at least be unequivocably on the side of Nature.

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Protecting Gulf of Maine circulation from poorly located offshore windfarm arrays and offshore aquaculture operations.

Preventing disruption of Gulf of Maine circulation from poorly located windfarm arrays 

Draft 10/15/23

Pt. 1 Ocean windfarms- an extractive industry.

A large body of scientif  ic literature details how  ocean windfarming  is an extractive industry that changes the natural oceanic environment that the energy is diverted from, as long as that wind is blowing. And cumulatively

At Issue: If a floating offshore wind turbine array  is anchored  within a coastal current, the megawatts and gigawatts of  kinetic wind energy  that it  extracts is prevented from reaching the water column within its "wind shadow" .  This slows that portion of the current  passing through the anchored facility.

Multiple things take place  the  extracted wind energy will not empower the current via Ekman Transfer. Or at a fraction of  what  the wind does to the currents NOT passing through the Array.

A commercial fishing industry that relies on the seasonal arrival of fish & crustacean larvae, and their ecological partners, from the waters of one coastal state or nation to the waters of another, via an existing ocean current can protect their interests, by requiring offshore wind energy projects not be positioned  geographically  "upstream" on those currents 

LEGAL TOOL The citizen suit provisions of the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act  provide the legal vehicle - Part 43 U.S.C. 1349 of OCSLA (pronounced "Ox-luh" )

OCSLA  43 USC 1349 § 8(p)(4) directs the Secretary to ensure activity
under that subsection is carried out . . .
[I]n a manner that provides for—
(A) safety;
(B) protection of the environment;
(C) prevention of waste;
(D) conservation of the natural resources of the outer Continental Shelf;

Let's consider "(D) conservation of the natural resources of the Outer Continental Shelf; "

The Maine Coastal Current is a natural phenomenon annually transports and distributes seasonal flows of larval fish, shellfish and plankton from the Bay of Fundy south along the Maine coast to Penobscot Bay.  Here it splits apart under the flood of Penobscot River water. Part of it  heads into the central Gulf of Maine, Part of it proceeds up Penobscot Bay   The rest continues along the coast to Massachusetts Bay   

 The Maine Coastal current itself is a natural resource, just as wind (its sustainer)   Just a)  sunlight is. as

When  the EMCC encounters the kinetic energy of the Penobscot River outflow, it gets  powered up, and   breaks into branches. Each nourishes different areas of the ocean

*Some proceed offshore into the Central Gulf of Maine.  Some travel southwest along the coast  to Massachusetts Bay.

Some travel up Penobscot Bay  as a bottom flow that rises onto the upper bay's  shoals, before entering  the tidal lower Penobscot River. 

The above is simplified.  

However the hydrology of the Gulf of Maine's chief currents is well documented, as is their roles  as ecological conveyor belts distributing  the planktonic stages of many species of regulatory concern.

Peer-reviewed studies past and recent detailing the Gulf of Maine's currents and their ecological roles - even as the species mix changes - have sufficiently identified these natural currents's systems' energetics and the dependance of biodiversity on at t windpowered  - including the changes wrought by GOM water warming.

Needed   We can model using  the  very latest 2022 and 23023 data,  the amount of water column disruption caused by an ocean wind array constantly diverting _N_ amount of gigawatts of wind energy from a discrete area of the Maine Coastal Current or other Gulf of Maine currents.

The is a trigger when it makes enough of a fuss in Neptune's kingdom for the Fish Feds and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Mgmts to have to take notice. 

Brostrom study was important - google "Goron Brostrom, ocean wind"

"In this study we outline how the presence of a large wind farm, which changes the wind stress at the sea surface, affects the upper ocean response to wind forcing. 

Using general theoretical arguments we show that large wind farms may have a direct, and strong, impact on the circulation pattern around the installation.

In particular, if the wind farm is large enough variations in the wind will create upwelling and downwelling patterns around the wind farm through divergence in the Ekman transport. 

The main theoretical description is based on the so called reduced gravity model, which describes the dynamics of a buoyant layer on top of a dense stagnant layer. 

The theoretical framework follows standard derivations used in the geophysical fluid dynamics (Gill, 1982, Pedlosky, 1987) and the analysis shows that the oceanic response is more sensitive to the curl of the wind stress than to the wind stress itself.

.....

" In the open ocean, the curl of the wind stress is usually relatively small as the gradients in the wind forcing are set by the scale of atmospheric low-pressure systems, which are much larger than the corresponding dynamical scales of the ocean. ... 

The presence of a wind farm will generate an unnaturally strong horizontal shear in the wind stress, which creates a large curl of the wind stress that causes a divergence/convergence in the upper ocean. . . 

We find that the impact on the ocean currents will increase with the size of the wind farm, and when the size is comparable with the internal radius of deformation (or internal Rossby radius) we expect to find a circulation, and an associated upwelling pattern, to be excited by the wind farm. ... 

Using a simple example we show that a wind speed  [differential] of 5–10 m/s can induce an upwelling exceeding 1/m day.

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