It’s a sunny afternoon in the English town of Ramsgate, and Steve Barratt is getting ready to fish. He’s on the deck of his boat, the Razorbill, running a massive tangle of nets through a squeaky pulley.
There’s a fish still stuck in one, so he tosses it to the side. “There’s one I missed. That’s a Dover sole. So that’ll be my dinner later,” he says, laughing.
Once Barratt departs, it’ll be a long trip to waters near the Netherlands, where he’ll fish for more Dover sole.
At the moment I’m having to steam three hours to catch fish,” he says. “Two reasons I’m having to steam three hours: one, to try and avoid fish I have no quota for, and the other reason is the wind farm’s in the way.
Barratt’s talking about a wind farm in the Thames Estuary that’s been in operation for the past seven years. It’s one of four off the coast of this region of England, and there are plans for an expansion.
Barratt says he’s lost valuable fishing ground to the wind farm. And he worries new wind farms will drive fish even further away.
Those are concerns echoed by some fishermen in New England, where states including Massachusetts hope the next boom in offshore wind will take off. The fishermen worry that wind farms will disrupt fisheries and make it even harder to make a living.
But European wind farm developers — some of whom are working on proposals to build in the United States say their industry can coexist with fishing. And they point to scientists to make their case.
Tracey Dalton, of the University of Rhode Island, is studying how the only offshore wind farm currently running in the U.S. is affecting fishermen there.
Her team is still gathering data, but she says so far some sport fishermen are reporting that the five turbines of the Block Island Wind Farm might actually be attracting fish, like an artificial reef.
A lot of charter boat captains are now taking people out for tours of the wind turbines, or they’re targeting fish around the turbines,” she says. “So that’s kind of an interesting change in how the area is being used.”
Dalton says commercial fishermen, on the other hand, are skeptical. There haven’t been a lot of long-term studies of how wind farms impact fisheries after they’re up and running.
And the Block Island Wind Farm is just five turbines. Meeting Massachusetts’ energy goals could mean hundreds more.
That could make some parts of the East Coast look more like the English coast, where offshore wind farms are an increasingly common sight.
WBUR 2018