Officials maintain feedback will be vetted before future decisions made on leases

Bethany Hooper
Associate Editor

(Oct. 3, 2024) Hundreds of community members, joined by local and state representatives, gathered at the convention center this week to learn more about a new area in in the ocean being studied for offshore wind energy development.

On Tuesday, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) hosted an informational meeting at the Roland E. Powell Convention Center to gather public feedback on a new call area in the Central Atlantic region. David MacDuffee, the chief of the Project and Coordination Branch in the Office of Renewable Energy Projects at BOEM, said comments gathered through Oct. 21 will ultimately be used to develop draft wind energy areas off the coast.

“What we’ll do with all this information is make sure that any areas deemed not suitable for wind energy development are taken off the table and that we narrow down the area …,” he said. “So we start very large, all the way up to the state-federal water boundary. We’re not proposing to issue wind leases that close to shore. In fact we’re not proposing anything at this point. No decisions have been made.”

Last month, BOEM announced a call area for a second offshore wind sale in the Central Atlantic. The second call area spans more than 13 million acres off the coasts of New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina, and starts roughly three-and-a-half miles from Ocean City’s shoreline.

The announcement has since launched a 60-day comment period, during which BOEM has scheduled a series of public meetings in all five affected states. In Maryland, more than 500 individuals registered ahead of this week’s informational session at the convention center. However, not all were happy with the meeting’s “open house” format, which featured information tables, displays and an area to submit comments.

“I want to thank everyone who came out to the BOEM meeting tonight at the Convention Center,” Ocean City Mayor Rick Meehan said in a social media post Tuesday. “This meeting was about a new proposed area designed for possible wind farm leases as close as 3.5 miles off of our coast. Unfortunately, BOEM decided this meeting would be for informational purposes only and not a true public hearing. I know that this left many that attended frustrated but your presence to support the town’s position in opposition was important and thank you.”

MacDuffee said Tuesday’s meeting was the start of what will be a multi-year process of analyzing public comments and data, narrowing its focus and developing draft wind energy areas, which will initiate another round of public comments. He said information BOEM has already received from its existing lease area off Maryland’s coast will also be used in the evaluation process.

“We then issue draft wind energy areas …,” he said. “We’ll put those out for public comment, and people can tell us if we got it right or if there is additional information to consider. So we’ll have other opportunities for the public, stakeholders, to review those draft areas before a decision is made to finalize those wind energy areas.”

From there, MacDuffee said BOEM could identify proposed lease areas.

“We may determine that it’s not suitable for leasing, and we just stop the process,” he explained.

Since the second call area was announced last month, state, county and municipal officials have gone on the record to oppose the project. Terry McGean, city manager for the Town of Ocean City, told the Mayor and Council last week he had also shared the town’s stance at a recent virtual meeting hosted by BOEM.

“I firmly stated our position opposing any visible turbines,” he said. “Many others also spoke at that task force meeting in opposition to the call area.”

BOEM’s announcement that it would be hosting a public meeting on a new call area came one week after the federal agency approved US Wind’s plans for approximately 114, 938-foot-tall wind turbines, which will be located in a lease area roughly 10 miles from Ocean City’s coastline. For that project, the city has announced its intention to sue BOEM.

“Our job is to follow the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which is the law Congress passed,” MacDuffee said this week in response to the pending litigation. “It gave the Department of the Interior jurisdiction to issue leases for energy development. So we follow that statute, as well as our regulations. We take very seriously the reviews that we do, particularly as projects are proposed and come in. The environmental analysis and the technical analysis that’s conducted is very rigorous. We just follow the process.”