As the Biden administration accelerated development plans for offshore wind farms, it received vigorous pushback from several local governments in Rhode Island that accused the administration of turning a blind eye to their concerns, according to internal documents reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.
"We have NEVER seen a more dysfunctional process," local officials wrote in a November 2022 letter addressed to the Department of the Interior's Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) in which they lambasted federal officials for ignoring the concern that wind farms would ruin Rhode Island's picturesque vistas and imposing their will like authoritarians.
The letter—obtained through a freedom of information request by the watchdog group Protect the Public's Trust and first reported by the Washington Free Beacon—was sent by Virginia-based firm Cultural Heritage Partners on behalf of the Town of New Shoreham, Rhode Island; the City of Newport, Rhode Island; and three Rhode Island preservation society organizations.
The subject was a wind farm being constructed less than 20 miles off the coast of Block Island's New Shoreham, known as the South Fork Wind project. The parties complained that BOEM and Interior Department leaders consulted primarily with industry officials rather than local communities and Native American tribes in an effort to push the project through and meet President Joe Biden's ambitious offshore wind goals.
Biden has pushed ahead with a goal to deploy 30 gigawatts of offshore wind energy by the end of the decade, the most ambitious goal of its kind anywhere in the world. While his administration has approved projects at a feverish pace, the only one that has been completed since 2021 is South Fork Wind, which has a listed capacity of 0.13 gigawatts.
The accusations outlined in the letter and additional documents reviewed by the Free Beacon highlight the tension between Biden's green energy agenda and the local stakeholders most impacted by the towering, landscape-altering infrastructure needed to achieve that agenda—or, as the letter puts it, the "adverse visual effects" of wind farms.
"Block Island is … a significant cultural landscape that will experience adverse visual effects, and the Southeast Lighthouse is a National Historic Landmark that will experience adverse visual effects," the letter states.
Similar conflicts have popped up nationwide over onshore wind, solar, hydropower, and mining projects, all of which are vital to producing more low-carbon energy.
The issue dates back to June 2018, when the South Fork Wind project's construction and operations plan was first submitted. After the Biden administration identified the project as a central part of its green energy plans, the Interior Department approved the construction and operations plan in November 2021, making it the second commercial-scale, offshore wind project to earn a green light.
Less than two weeks prior to that approval, Cultural Heritage Partners wrote to the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (ACHP), an independent agency that ensures historic properties are considered during the development of any federal project, according to internal emails obtained by the Free Beacon.
"I write respectfully to request that the ACHP refuse to sign the proposed Memorandum of Agreement for the South Fork Wind project," Cultural Heritage Partners founding partner Marion Werkheiser wrote in an email to the advisory council. "BOEM is running roughshod over American Indian tribes and some of our nation's most historic communities. Signing this [memorandum of agreement] in its current proposed state will create a regrettable precedent for all future offshore wind projects. It will substantially reduce the ACHP's ability to balance protections of historic assets with new energy development."
ACHP executive director Reid Nelson responded after the Interior Department approved the project's construction and operations plan, saying that he did not take the concerns "lightly" but that ACHP determined BOEM satisfied its requirements on the preservation of historic properties. He added, though, that ACHP would advise BOEM to begin devoting more time and resources to assessing the impacts of offshore wind development.
Internal emails suggest that senior BOEM officials charged with signing off on wind development were aware of the criticism but have moved forward anyway, approving the projects without increasing consultations with concerned stakeholders.
Protect the Public's Trust director Michael Chamberlain said the administration's actions reveal deep hypocrisy—throughout her tenure, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland has made a point of promising to incorporate local and tribal feedback into her agency's decisions.
"Not only does it seem that in their arrogance Interior didn't care about the rules when approving wind projects, they also didn't appear to care about the concerns of the people they affected," Chamberlain told the Free Beacon. "It didn't seem that anything was going to stop them from plowing ahead—not the local communities, not the Tribes that they promised to give more input, not even other federal agencies that were supposed to be involved."
"When Secretary Haaland promised to change the way the department dealt with the Tribes in decision making, most people probably thought she meant they would get more input," Chamberlain said. "However, it looks like the caveat was that the Tribe had to go along with the administration."
Additional criticism came from inside the Biden administration. In October 2022, National Marine Fisheries Service assistant regional administrator Louis Chiarella wrote to the BOEM noting deficiencies in the bureau's approval process for Vineyard Wind, a project located right off the coast of Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts.
Chiarella complained that BOEM issued an updated construction and operations plan for Vineyard Wind just six days before the National Marine Fisheries Service was expected to provide feedback, stating that it was an "unreasonable timeline for review and comment." He further suggested BOEM hadn't incorporated the National Marine Fisheries Service's previous recommendations into the updated plan for construction.
"Based on this experience, we recommend BOEM and NMFS staff have a more robust discussion to allow us to better understand the standards BOEM is using," wrote Chiarella in a letter to BOEM and reviewed by the Free Beacon. "This appears to be an issue for more than this [Vineyard Wind] project, as similar issues are occurring with the South Fork Project."
The letter sparked an email thread between a handful of BOEM officials who debated how to respond to the National Marine Fisheries Service's concerns. At one point, Travis Annatoyn, an official in the Interior Department's Office of the Solicitor, lamented that the discussion had devolved into "fairly complicated games of telephone."