By MADDY VITALE
Cape May County officials are celebrating the decision by a state regulatory agency to rescind the approvals for two offshore wind farm projects once proposed by the Danish energy company Orsted.
“Today is a very important day in our ongoing opposition to these environmentally destructive offshore wind projects,” Cape May County Commission Director Leonard Desiderio said in a news release.
In 2023, Orsted scrapped plans to build two wind farms off the South Jersey coast after concluding that the projects would not be worth the enormous development cost.
The state Board of Public Utilities' action this week to vacate the regulatory approvals for the projects follows the filing of lawsuits by Cape May County in both state and federal courts. Cape May County challenged the BPU’s orders, all of which have now been vacated and deemed of no force or effect, according to the news release.
The state agreed to let Orsted keep $175 million in escrow funds in exchange for vacating the BPU Orders. Cape May County’s actions before the state appellate division and the federal district court remain active at this time, the news release stated.
Desiderio noted that by “vacating the orders,” the BPU has made it much more difficult for Orsted or any other big wind company to utilize the lease areas for wind farm development just a few miles off Cape May County's beaches.
“As we have seen in Nantucket over the past few weeks, these industrial electricity-generating facilities represent an unacceptable threat to our environment and, consequently, to our local economy,” Desiderio said.
In Nantucket, Mass., a 115,000-pound turbine blade as long as a football field broke and disintegrated, spewing tons of industrial waste into the Atlantic coastal environment and fouling miles of beaches.
“In Nantucket, the disintegration of a single turbine blade has led to tens of thousands of pounds of fiberglass, foam, industrial adhesive and other contaminants in the water and washing up on local beaches, which have had to be closed. We cannot allow that to happen to Cape May County,” Desiderio said.
Cape May County Board of Commissioners Director Leonard Desiderio, at podium, joins with other elected officials in a Nov. 1, 2023, news conference to celebrate Orsted's withdrawing from the wind farm projects.
Michael Donohue, who serves as Cape May County's special counsel against the wind farms, said, "We can know for sure that the County of Cape May and its partners in the fishing and tourism industries, as well as respectable environmental groups, certainly contributed to Orsted’s decision to abandon the Ocean Wind industrial offshore wind projects."
He noted that their opposition "led directly to their agreement to have the Board of Public Utilities rescind their approvals for Ocean Wind One and Ocean Wind Two."
"We have informed the appellate division of the New Jersey Superior Court that we believe that there are still Constitutional and conflicts-of-interest questions that they should hear," Donohue said in the news release. "We are also likely to amend our Federal Court filings since the actions of the NJBPU would appear to have nullified Orsted’s federal permits.”
Cape May County is also supporting the efforts of Brigantine, Atlantic County, in its opposition to the proposed Atlantic Shores offshore wind project. Atlantic Shores would be located only eight miles off Brigantine and would be visible from the north end of Cape May County.
“We saw with the Vineyard Wind environmental catastrophe in Nantucket that tons of industrial debris quickly traversed fifteen miles of open ocean to end up on Nantucket’s beaches,” Donohue said. “With a similar blade disintegration in the Atlantic Shores project, given the typical southerly currents close to shore, Cape May County’s beaches would be strewn with thousands of pieces of jagged fiberglass and foam.”
