Massachusetts Ocean Wind Turbine Disaster

The federal Energy Policy Act of 2005 gave the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) the responsibility for renewable energy development on the outer continental shelf (OCS) with ocean wind turbines.

Since 2005 the Massachusetts wind turbine agenda has been a disaster.

Since 2009, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts through the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center has taken the health and property rights of first the citizens of Falmouth and then twenty-one other communities with poorly placed wind turbines.

Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick and the legislature in 2009 set a goal of developing 2,000 megawatts (MW) of land-based wind power capacity by 2020. The state land-based wind turbine agenda has been quietly swept under the rug by embarrassed state officials who omitted wind turbine noise documents from as far back as the 1970s.

The current Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker after the land-based wind turbine disaster agreed to a 2016 law authorized 1,600 megawatts of offshore wind power.

The Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection is stuck in regulatory capture working with the wind turbine industry and ignoring the health and property rights of citizens and now the living creatures in the ocean which include Whales that depend on their own frequencies to navigate.

MassDEP is rubber-stamping the placement of ocean wind turbine cables anywhere the wind industry wants just like the Falmouth wind turbine health and financial fiasco.

The MassDEP actually brokered a wind turbine loan on the Town of Falmouth second wind turbine called Falmouth Wind II using the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, ARRA federal funds that took the health and property rights of up to 200 local residents. The state and town had all the documents each of the turbines generated 110 decibels of noise capable of generating infra-sound or what is low-frequency noise.

MassDEP has never enforced its own noise regulations against any wind turbine in Massachusetts. Between 2007 and 2010 the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection ran a program called the Massachusetts Energy Management Pilot Program. In any of the state documents, there are no sections that include the safety and health of citizens living around wind turbines.

The US Department of Energy has known since the 1980s at a Boone North Carolina 2 megawatt wind turbine about the thumping sounds called human annoyance now defined as infra-sound.

In Rhode Island, within six months of the ocean wind turbines going online, there were seven whale deaths and two known turtle deaths. There were not seven whale deaths in the previous ten years.

Necropsies of the Whales are done by independent agencies but it is not clear if these agencies or institutes receive state and federal monies that could influence the decision if the Whales lost navigation skills due to ocean wind turbine infrasound.

Million of marine mammals rely on sensitive sonar to navigate through our oceans, and infrasound from offshore wind turbines (along with other ocean noise such as seismic surveys and military sonar) can interfere with this, causing them to become confused and disorientated.

Yet in spite of warnings from experts and scientists, the Massachusetts gung-ho legislature and irresponsible proliferation of wind farms in our seas continue unabated.

The Whales and Dolphins Killed by US Sonar (2003)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rgc2nfU2Y-g