Portsmouth residents are voicing their opposition to windfarm cables. Here's why.

PORTSMOUTH – The Town Council’s public workshop on Southcoast Wind’s proposal to run a transmission cable from its 149-turbine offshore lease, along the bed of the Sakonnet River, overland across Portsmouth’s Island Park and through Mount Hope Bay to Brayton Point in Somerset, Massachusetts, was supposed to feature a question and answer period between Portsmouth residents and Southcoast Wind representatives.

In practice, the public comment period functioned more as an airing of dissent on the part of local residents who spoke in clear opposition to the proposal.

Approximately 100 residents attended the workshop, and while not all who showed up were in opposition to the cables and the offshore wind leases, the majority who took the opportunity to offer public comment were opposed to either the local routing of the cables, the siting of offshore wind leases in important coastal habitats and fisheries, or the industrialization of the eastern seaboard for offshore wind energy production in general.

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Throughout the public comment period, individuals who spoke out in opposition elicited echoing shouts of agreement and encouragement and rounds of applause after making points the local crowd found to be particularly salient.

Joe Forgione, the first member of the public to speak in opposition to the proposed cable route, described himself as an environmentalist before drawing hearty applause from the crowd when he tied together the trepidations of many with a succinct summation:

“I do not take the position that we should harm the environment today in order to fulfill the promise of improving the environment in the future, and that’s what this project could do.”

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He questioned the basis for Mayflower’s determination that the Sakonnet River was the preferable route for its transmission cables, noting the company had dismissed two alternative routes which would have made landfall in Little Compton or Second Beach in Middletown.

“Is it based upon economics, is it based on engineering, or is it based upon politics?” he asked rhetorically, again drawing applause and echoed support from the crowd before suggesting the company could spend more money to land the cables via a different route.

“I contend that there are cable routes in Rhode Island and Massachusetts that are less impactful to recreational and residential areas than Portsmouth,” he continued, citing the CRMC’s rating of the Sakonnet River as “a pristine habitat, which means it should be protected at the highest level.”

Some members of local fishing industry deeply concerned about “ocean industrialization” and its impact on fisheries and marine life

Ralph Craft, owner of Crafty One Customs tackle and custom fishing rod shop on East Main Road, said he recently took his own vessel 71 miles offshore to assess for himself the impending impact of the construction and long-term presence of the offshore wind leases. Like Forgione, he described himself as an environmentalist who believes in green energy, then necessity for society to adapt to address climate change and the importance of preserving the earth for future generations.

However, he stressed the vast scale of the offshore wind lease area and the proportionate impact he believes it will have on coastal fisheries, repeatedly asking Southcoast to “do your due diligence – because you are going to profit from it” and do thorough studies on the impact offshore wind turbines will have on various local marine species from the top to the bottom of the food chain. Among other things, he noted the Sakonnet River is Rhode Island’s only protected cod hatchery.

He was followed by Portsmouth resident and fourth-generation commercial fisherman Corey Wheeler Forrest, who reiterated grave concerns about long-term damage to the fisheries her multi-billion dollar industry depends on.

“Every commercial fisherman I know, including myself, is an environmentalist and a conservationist to the core…my own family’s fishery is historical and unique to Rhode Island and has been around for 200 years," Forrest said. "How will 1,400 square miles…of ocean industrialization, thousands of wind turbines that are hundreds of feet taller than the tallest building in Boston plus the cables installed up the Sakonnet River under our beaches and coastal ecosystem, going to impact our fisheries, our food source and the migrations we all depend on now and for future generations?”

Pointing out that the fishing industry is held to stringent state and federal environmental regulations, she asked, “Just like the laws that govern and make our fisheries sustainable, shouldn’t the wind farms be required to adhere to those same standards?”

Who owns Southcoast Wind?

Southcoast Wind as previously named Mayflower Wind when it first approached the town of Portsmouth last June in preparation for its hearing process with the state’s Energy Facility Siting Board to seek approval for its preferred cable route up the Sakonnet, is one of seven offshore wind developers holding leases in a 1,400-square mile tract of ocean off the coast of Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

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All of the leaseholders are generically named LLCs backed by large multinational energy companies. Southcoast is a joint venture between Shell Oil and Ocean Winds North America. Ocean Winds is itself a joint venture between a French multinational utility company called ENGIE and EDP Renewables North America, a subsidiary of Portuguese multinational utility EDP. EDP Renewables North America was formerly called Horizon Wind Energy while it was owned by Goldman Sachs from 2015-2019.

This article originally appeared on Newport Daily News: Sakonnet River cables from offshore windfarms opposed in Portsmouth