Credit: NJ Governor's OfficeSince last June, when Gov. Phil Murphy unveiled plans to build the country’s first greenfield port for offshore wind adjacent to the Salem and Hope Creek nuclear power plants on Artificial Island, his administration has issued a steady stream of progress reports affirming ground will be broken on the Salem County project this year.
Initially, the Wind Port would serve as the assembly point for turbines to power offshore wind farms not just along New Jersey’s coast but for projects up and down the Eastern Seaboard.
The most recent progress report came at the end of November, when the New Jersey Economic Development Authority, which is managing the project, issued a request for qualifications for a construction management firm to oversee building the Wind Port. On Jan. 5, that step was completed, with eight companies submitting applications.
Brian Sabina, the EDA’s senior vice president of economic transformation, told NJ Spotlight News recently the agency is reviewing the applicants and will work over the coming months to shortlist five. “We expect to close that process in the second quarter of this year, and move forward with construction that same quarter, or in Q3,” said Sabina, who is overseeing the project.
“For a project like this to go from an idea, with 10, 15 people really being in the know, to public announcement in under a year is fairly rare,” Sabina continued. “It’s a pretty exciting story of government delivering in innovative ways.”
Prior prepping of wind port site
One of the reasons ground can be broken so soon is that the 200 acres of Delaware River shoreline where the Wind Port will be built is not a pure greenfield — a previously undeveloped site. It was already prepped for industrial use.
In 2014, PSE&G wanted to erect a third nuclear power plant on the land, a portion of which was owned by the federal government and utilized by the Army Corps of Engineers as a confined disposal facility for materials dredged from the Delaware River and Bay channels. “Salem 4,” as the plant was to be named, never came to fruition, but the proposed project triggered a suite of environmental impact reviews.
“Because of that, a significant amount of environmental assessment had been done,” Sabina said. “We were able to benefit from all that learning as we were going into the process of permitting for this project.”
Many environmental hurdles may have been cleared already, but new troubles loom, highlighting the complexities of building infrastructure intended to reduce future greenhouse-gas emissions yet threatened by atmospheric damage that’s already been done.
The low-lying shore of the Delaware Bay is considered a sea-level-rise hotspot; water levels over the next 80 years will likely be on the higher end of New Jersey’s own projections of up to 2.1 feet of sea-level rise by 2050, and 6.3 feet by 2100. Staying dry will require an enormous amount of landfill and other engineering intervention to avoid the flooding and storm surges that are all but inevitable over the course of the 15-to-25 years of steady turbine marshalling and manufacturing that Sabina says the Wind Port will sustain.
Sabina wasn’t able to say just how much fill the site will require, as that aspect of phase one construction “will be determined through a regulatory process that is currently ongoing.”
The right place for clean energy?
“What are the ramifications of putting another operation in this location where the waters are going to be rising?” said Delaware Riverkeeper’s chief executive officer, Maya van Rossum. “We need to be finding a way to advance clean energy in the right places and in the right way — is that something that’s doable in this location?”
Sabina believes it is. He recalled a conversation last year with Shawn LaTourette, now the DEP’s acting commissioner, in which LaTourette said building the Wind Port to account for future sea level-rise wasn’t just good environmental policy, but good asset-management policy. “We fully embrace that,” Sabina said. “We are building the Wind Port so that it meets NJ PACT standards” — referring to the state’s Protecting Against Climate Threats initiative, which in part will update land-use regulations to account for future sea-level rise.
Van Rossum, who has long fought to stop the construction of Salem 4, is admittedly relieved that a wind energy port will replace a nuclear generating station on Artificial Island. Nevertheless, she is worried about the facility’s impact on the Delaware Estuary’s endangered Atlantic sturgeon population, which includes only 300 spawning adults.
“We are a little bit concerned about the level of investigation into the impacts on the aquatic ecosystems,” van Rossum said. “I just feel that there is not enough consideration as to what the ramifications would be for that species, where that area of the Delaware Estuary is so important.”
Sabina made clear that both Murphy and EDA Chief Executive Tim Sullivan have both emphasized doing the Wind Port project right. “We’ve assessed appropriately and done the studies around shellfish and fish,” Sabina said. “And I think we feel confident that we can deliver on this broader clean energy-project while minimizing impacts to those species.”
Since going online in 1977, Salem Nuclear Power Plant’s water intake system has proven devastating for not only sturgeon but also many other marine species native to the estuary, killing over 14 billion fish, eggs and larvae every year, according to van Rossum.
With no need to draw from the river a staggering three billion gallons of water per day, as Salem’s nuclear reactors do, the Wind Port would undoubtedly inflict far less damage on the surrounding ecosystem’s marine species. But the dredging that will be necessary to accommodate the large turbine installation vessels in the shipping channel poses a significant risk to the sturgeon.
“It’s the transformation of the river-bottom habitats that are critical for a species that’s on the brink of extinction,” said van Rossum. “If you wipe out their habitat, if you subject them to more harm and damage so they can’t propagate and procreate, then we are being responsible for wiping an entirely genetically unique line of a species from Earth. We just need to make sure that if they’re going to do this, they’re going to do it right and do it well.”
