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Competing interests and litigation kept the Cape Wind Project from being permitted and constructed for almost a decade. Now, fishers are concerned with a proposal by Deepwater Wind to construct a large offshore wind farm in federal waters between Rhode Island and Massachusetts.

While the United States struggles to plan, permit, and construct offshore wind farms, Europe is rapidly developing their infrastructure to capture offshore wind resources by constructing ambitious projects and proposing ever-larger offshore wind projects. More on Deepwater Wind’s proposal via the Providence Journal:

“We understand the value of this thing,” said Chris Brown, president of the Rhode Island Commercial Fishermen’s Association. “But we don’t want to become collateral damage.”

Brown said that Deepwater had reached out to fishing groups and tried to work with them in determining a location for the 1,000-megawatt wind farm, but they couldn’t find a site that wouldn’t affect the fishing industry.

“It’s all critical habitat,” he said. “There’s someone making a living on every square inch.”

Deepwater said it purposely designed the wind farm to accommodate commercial and recreational boaters. The project, called the Deepwater Wind Energy Center, is divided into two main arrays, one of about 50 turbines and another of 150 turbines. The company would space the machines 0.7 miles apart to allow fishing boats to more easily travel through the groupings. Corridors 1.5 miles long would also cut through parts of the project for boat navigation.

But Brown and Lanny Dellinger, president of the Rhode Island Lobstermen’s Association, said it may not be Deepwater’s decision whether boats would be allowed to travel into the wind farm. Dellinger said he knows of insurers in Europe who won’t allow it for fear of a vessel hitting a turbine.

“Commercial fishing and wind farms are not compatible,” he said.

State officials, however, said that the two industries can indeed coexist.

“Our goal here is not only to achieve a renewable-energy future for Rhode Island,” said Keith Stokes, executive director of the state Economic Development Corporation. “We’re not going to supplant the fishing and boating industries in Rhode Island. We know how important they are to the state.”

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