Grace Kelly: Floating turbines may be part of New England offshore-wind network

Floating turbines come in various styles.

— Joshua Bauer/U.S. Department of Energy

From ecoRI News (ecori.org)

The winds and airs currents swirling around the oceans of this blue marble have the potential to power our cities and towns. And locally in coastal New England, the race to harness the power of coastal wind has been accelerating.

Last year then-Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo signed an executive order that called for an ambitious, yet somewhat vague, “100 percent renewable energy future for Rhode Island by 2030” — a good portion of which would be from offshore wind.

“There is no offshore wind industry in America except right here in Rhode Island,” Raimondo said at the time. She was referring to the groundbreaking five-turbine Block Island Wind Farm, a 30-megawatt project that was the first commercial offshore wind facility in the United States.

Today, there is a slightly different picture forming, and other New England states, notably Massachusetts and Maine, are looking into becoming a part of a regional offshore wind network.

During a March 18 online presentation, Environment America discussed a recently released report detailing the overall potential that offshore wind has, specifically in New England. The discussion also included presentations from experts in the field of offshore wind.

“We found that the U.S. has a technical potential to produce more than 7,200 terawatt-hours of electricity in offshore wind,” said Hannah Read of Environment America, a federation of state-based environmental advocacy organizations. “What we did was we compared that to both our electricity used in 2019 and the potential electricity used in 2050, assuming that we transition society to run mostly on electric rather than fossil fuels, and what we found is that offshore wind could power our 2019 electricity almost two times over, and in 2050 could power 9 percent of our electricity needs.”

On a more granular level, Read said Massachusetts has the highest potential for offshore-wind-generation capacity, and Maine has the highest ratio of potential-generation capacity relative to the amount of electricity that it uses.

Massachusetts is entering the final stages of the federal permitting process for the 800-megawatt Vineyard Wind project, which is slated to start construction next year and go online in 2023.

“We have some real frontrunners here in New England and we have a huge opportunity to take advantage of this resource,” Read said. “When you look at the New England as a region, it could generate more than five times its projected 2050 electricity demand.”

While Rhode Island and Massachusetts are looking to more traditional fixed-bottom turbines, in coastal Maine, where coastal waters are deeper, researchers at the University of Maine are testing prototypes for floating wind turbines.

“The state of Maine has deep waters off its coasts. If you go three nautical miles off the coast … you’re in about 300 feet of water,” said Habib Dagher, founding executive director of the Advanced Structures & Composites Center at the University of Maine. “Therefore, you can’t really use fixed-bottom turbines.”

To mitigate this, Dagher and his team have been building and testing floating turbines for the past 13 years, using technology from an unlikely source.

“There are three different categories of floating turbines and ironically enough we have the oil and gas industry to thank for developing floating structures,” Dagher said. “We borrowed these designs … and adapted them to floating turbines.”

Many of these floating turbines rely on mooring lines and drag anchors to keep them from floating away, and they come in various styles.

Dagher noted that while other states are able to pile-drive turbines, they should consider floating turbines as another way to fit more wind power into select offshore areas that could become crammed full.

“We’re going to run out of space to put fixed-bottom turbines. We have to start looking at floating … on the Massachusetts coast and beyond, in the rest of the Northeast,” he said.

Shilo Felton, a field manager for the Audubon Society’s Clean Energy Initiative, addressed another issue facing offshore wind: bird migration patterns. Focusing on the northern gannet, a large seabird, she explained that while climate change itself is negatively affecting bird populations, it is important to take care that offshore wind doesn’t make the situation worse.

She noted that Northern Gannets experience both direct and indirect risks from offshore wind. “Direct risks are things like collision, indirect risks are things like habitat loss,” Felton said.

But Felton also acknowledged that since we don’t really have lots of large-scale wind projects in the United States currently, it’s hard to really say how much those risks will impact bird populations.

“We don’t have any utility-scale projects yet, so we don’t really know how the build out in the United States is going to impact species,” she said. “So that requires us to take this adaptive management approach where we monitor impacts as we build out so that we can understand what those impacts are.”

Overall, the potential that offshore wind holds as a viable mitigation tactic in the fight to curb and eventually eradicate greenhouse-gas emissions is great. But, as speakers noted, implementation has to be done thoughtfully and thoroughly.

Referring specifically to Maine, Dagher said, “The state is moving on to do a smaller project of 10 to 12 turbines, and that would help us crawl before we walk, walk before we run. Start with one, then put in 10 to 12 and learn the ecological impacts, learn how to work with fisheries, learn how to better site these things before we go out and do bigger projects in the future.”

Grace Kelly is an ecoRI News journalist.

Grace Kelly: The bumpy road to R.I.’s East Bay Bike Path

Facing south near the East Bay Bike Path's southern terminus, in Bristol

From ecoRI News (ecori.org)

“These days it’s hard to find someone who thinks creating the East Bay Bike Path was a foolish idea.” So begins a Providence Journal article written in 1999 by Sam Nitz, which chronicled the bike path’s beginnings and eventual completion.

The same could be said in 2020, a year when a pandemic forced people to get creative with their time. They took to the outdoors when the weather turned warm, with many dragging a set of wheels to a Rhode Island bike path that runs from Providence to Bristol.

I cruised along this path myself, dodging hand-holding couples, bold squirrels, and the occasional toddling roller-skater.

A map of the East Bay Bike Path from a 1984 pamphlet. Construction of the trail took place from 1987-92.

While looking at the path today might give the impression that it was a beloved idea all along, as Nitz noted in his article, “the path’s beginnings in the early 1980s were fraught with controversy and rancorous political debate.”

The 14.5-mile stretch of asphalt was hardly a shoo-in. In fact, it was met with raucous opposition, German shepherds, and even a letter to a high-level staffer of President Reagan begging for federal intervention.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

The story of the East Bay Bike Path starts with an old stretch of railroad that connected Providence to Bristol, with stops in Riverside and Warren and a connecting line that went to Fall River, Mass. It was a handsome railway, with postcards and old photos depicting almost modern-looking platforms and stations — one particular image of the rail near the future Squantum Association, a private club in East Providence, could be from the 2000s.

But as automobiles began to capture the American spirit, the railway slowly faded into disuse and the passenger line ended in 1938. In 1976, the State of Rhode Island acquired the right of way for the old Penn Central line, the section that ran from East Providence to Bristol.

It would also be automobiles that would inspire Bristol state Rep. Thomas Byrnes Jr. in the late 1970s, to lead the charge to create a bike path on the old Penn Central line.

“When I started at the State House in ’78, the oil shortage was … tough,” said Byrnes in a 2002 interview with his daughter Judith. “People were driving bombers around and they were having a hard time keeping their cars filled with gas. So, they were talking about looking into alternative means of transportation to cut our use of oil.”

And one idea that came up: bicycles.

In the ’70s, the United States experienced a bicycle boom, with some 64 million Americans using bicycles regularly. A 1971 article in Time magazine noted that America was having “the bicycles biggest wave of popularity in its 154-year history.”

So, at the time when Byrnes started thinking about alternative methods of transportation, bicycles were everywhere, and other states such as Maryland were starting to investigate turning old railways into bike trails.

In March 1980, Byrnes and Matthew Smith, who was the Rhode Island speaker of the House at the time, wrote a joint bill that called for a study of bicycling as an alternative form of transportation and as an energy saver. The idea of the East Bay Bike Path was born.

What happened next was years of pushing through heated resistance.

“There was a lot of opposition, a lot of opposition,” said Robert Weygand, who was the chairman of the East Providence Planning Board in the early ’80s, and who later went on to be a U.S. congressman and Rhode Island lieutenant governor. “In every community there were people that came out opposed to it.”

Weygand became involved in the project through his work on the East Providence Planning Board and later as part of a group called Friends of the Bike Path. He saw its creation as a way to help restore East Providence’s once-rich history of activities and attractions along the water.

“We heard about what Tom [Byrnes] had been proposing for a bicycle trail along the railroad tracks … and we were in East Providence, which had a long history of having amusement parks and various venues along the railroad tracks,” Weygand said. “So we were interested in trying to reinvigorate the idea of having activities along the waterfront, which had been abandoned for a very, very long time.”

The East Bay Bike Path had plenty of fierce opposition, but had the support of the Rhode Island Department of Transportation and its then-director Edward Wood.

The wheels were now set in motion, and in 1982, Gov. J. Joseph Garrahy and the Rhode Island Department of Transportation (DOT), which was then led by Edward Wood, who died this year, threw their support behind the project and hired an engineering firm to research feasibility and design.

“The biggest thing that really helped us along the way was governor Joe Garrahy … he really embraced it,” Weygand said. “And also, there was a fella that was the head of the Department of Transportation, Ed Wood.”

But though Wood and Garrahy supported the project, many in their own circles were firmly against it.

“Even Wood at DOT ran into opposition by his own staff,” Weygand said. “They wanted to preserve the East Bay railroad track system … potentially for freight traffic and rail traffic … so his own staff was fighting him because they thought, if we give up the railroad tracks, we'll never get them back.”

Meanwhile, Byrnes, Weygand, a man named George Redman — you’ll find his name and portrait on the section of the bike path that crosses Interstate 195’s Washington Bridge — and a group of others were busy fighting their own battle on the ground to win the people of the five municipalities over on the idea.

“We constantly met, talked about different opportunities, did public hearings and meetings … and we’d get together periodically to share war stories about what was going on,” said Weygand, with a chuckle. “There was some real opposition. We had a public hearing in 1983 at the Barrington YMCA, and people were yelling and screaming and swearing at us, saying that all the criminals from Providence would use this bike path to come down and steal things from their homes. It was terrible.”

One vivid memory Weygand has of the resistance was when he helped organize a walk of the proposed area to give people a feel for what it could be like.

“One of the things that happened that day that we had this walk was, we had about 50 or so people go along the path … and in notifying all of the abutting owners, one of the owners was Squantum Club,” Weygand recalled. “We had invited them to join us along the way, and when we got to the Squantum Club, the manager was there with German shepherds and cars to prevent us from passing anywhere near their property.”

James W. Nugent, who was a member of the Squantum Association at the time, even went as far as to write a letter to James A. Baker III, a friend of his who was the chief of staff of President Reagan.

“At a time when the nation is looking for ways to cut expenditures and increase income, I thought it appropriate to call to your attention an expenditure that to me, and to many residents of Rhode Island, seems almost frivolous,” Nugent’s letter reads. “When there is publicity about people going hungry and dangerous federal deficits, the logic of expanding over $1 million on a bicycle path escapes me — especially when so many people along the route of the path object strongly to it. They fear increased vandalism and housebreaks from the transient traffic when their properties become more easily accessible.”

Nugent goes on to ask Baker to sway the federal government to withhold funds for the project.

Though opposition was strong, there were supporters who should not be discounted. One of them was Barry Schiller, who was the on the transportation committee of the environmental group Ecology Action.

In a 1984 letter to Wood, Schiller wrote, “This should be an ideal bikeway, scenic, safe and relatively flat that will become the pride of the East Bay.”

Schiller’s words were prophetic in some ways. Instead of being a so-called crime highway, the East Bay Bike Path has become a place where friends and families gather and exercise. Instead of negatively affecting home values, living near the bike path is considered an asset. It’s also inspired other Rhode Island municipalities to build their own bike paths; there are eight today, according to DOT.

In the end, the proponents won out, and on May 22, 1986 ground was broken at Riverside Square, and the East Bay Bike Path became a reality.

“It seems like a long time ago, but it really wasn’t,” Weygand said. “It was absolutely wonderful, breaking ground and seeing it constructed.”

Construction took place from 1987-92, and today when Rhode Islanders cruise by on its blacktop, many are likely unaware of all it took for it to get done. But those who were there, those who helped push it through, they remember.

“Every time I ride the East Bay Bike Path, it gives me the inspiration to keep going, because I knew it took persistence in the face of strong opposition to get it done,” Schiller said. “It’s a lesson for all of us to not give up.”

Grace Kelly is an ecoRI News reporter.

Grace Kelly: Getting more Black and Brown kids out into nature

A meeting in the woods of Exeter, R.I., of students in the Movement Education Outdoors program.

— Photo by Grace Kelly for ecoRI News

From ecoRI News

EXETER, R.I.

A group of five 10th-graders tromp through a wooded path at the Canonicus Camp & Conference Center on Exeter Road. They talk about school, the platform Doc Martens they would love to have, and how New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is great but also, it’s probably better not to idolize politicians. {Canonicus was a 17th Century Narragansett Indian chief.}

Their guide on this excursion is Joann “Jo” Ayuso, founder of Movement Education Outdoors (MEO), an organization with a mission to provide outdoor experiences for community-based organizations serving Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) youth. She shows them nature.

“The outdoors is sacred, and yes, this land,” she said, and spreads her arms around her, gesturing at the grass and trees, “has a history of colonization, but I want us to feel welcome here. I want to invite you to make your own memories today, to decolonize this space. I introduce you to these spaces so you can own them and feel connected to the land.”

According to the National Health Foundation, while people of color make up nearly 40 percent of the population, 70 percent of the people who visit national forests, parks, and wildlife refuges are White. A mere 7 percent of national park visitors are Black.

There are many factors at play when it comes to communities of color not having the same opportunities to experience the outdoors. Ayuso said:

“I think it’s very important for people to know, that, for example, when your mom is a single parent, working three jobs, doesn’t have a car, how is she going to have time to take her kids hiking? And, unfortunately, bus lines don’t take you to any of the green space Rhode Island has to offer.”

There’s also the fact that outdoor gear is expensive, with basic equipment such as lightweight coats, hiking boots, and backpacks costing a premium.

“Equipment is always a barrier for young, low-income and urban youth,” Ayuso said. “Even having the proper layering for hiking in the fall or winter, that’s expensive.”

By starting MEO in 2018, Ayuso hopes to change this paradigm.

Ayuso’s journey from being born into poverty to being an outdoor educator for BIPOC youth started in the forests of the southern wild.

“One of my very first experiences with the outdoors was in the military,” she said. Ayuso entered the military after graduating from Joseph P. Keefe Technical High School, in Framingham, Mass., prompted in part by her brother who had also joined, and by the desire to work her way up in the world. While military service didn’t prove to be her dream, it was how she discovered her love of nature.

“One of the things I loved about the military was being outdoors, just hiking, having my rucksack on and just hiking for hours,” said Ayuso, who served in the Army in 1989-1996. “To this day, I can still remember smelling the eucalyptus trees in the South, and also smelling the pine trees when we would do our training early in the morning. It was just something that really helped me pass time, and that was one of the most memorable times of me experiencing the outdoors.”

Ayuso would come back to that moment years later, and it would be part of a series of experiences that would inspire her to create an organization to bring Black and Brown youth into nature.

In the years that filled her life between the military and MEO, Ayuso built a personal-training business in Wellesley, Mass., and left it, started a new life in Providence, learned she loved working with young people, began practicing mindfulness, and discovered her ancestral roots in Puerto Rico and West Africa.

But it was when she was hit by a car two years ago outside her Providence home and spent six months healing that she started to unravel what she wanted to do with her life.

“I had six weeks of recovery, and in those six weeks I was like, ‘I’ve gotta do something different,’” said the 48-year-old. “My partner and I just got to talking about what is it that you want to do for the rest of your life? What is it that you think you will enjoy?”

Her partner asked her to reflect on the past 15 years and think about the things she really loved.

“And I thought, ‘Damn, I really loved that time in the military when I was hiking. That was awesome.’ I felt like that was healing, that kept my mind kind of straight,” Ayuso recalled. “So my hiking experience in the military, the mindfulness training that I’ve had in the last 20 years, the Native and Black history I learned for myself, and seeing the environmental justice and climate change on Black and Brown bodies, that became the four pillars of Movement Education Outdoors.”

MEO partners with local schools such as Nowell Leadership Academy, in Providence, and such nonprofits as Riverzedge Arts, in Woonsocket, to bring underserved youth into the outdoors and to help them reflect on who they are and where they come from.

And on this chilly fall day in Exeter, the students are loving it.

As they walk through the forest of pine, oak and maple, they notice the acorns on the ground, the oak apple wasp galls tucked between fallen leaves, and learn about how beavers change the landscape to suit their needs.

They pause for a guided meditation at a bridge overlooking a pond and breathe in the cold air, watching as their breath billows around them when they exhale. They continue through the woods and stop at a rock wall to discuss the farming history of this land.

“So when the glaciers melted, they left lots of rocks here,” said a MEO intern. “And the colonizers used them to make rocks walls.”

Ayuso noted that these rock walls delineated farming property, and that between 1636 and 1750, South County farmers turned from enslaving Indigenous people to enslaving thousands of Blacks from Africa to make their farms into plantations comparable to those in the South.

The group continues onward and upward, heading to a steep incline and making their way to an overlook known as “The Pinnacle.”

The students pause at a large boulder, resting weary Converse-clad feet and shooting the breeze. Ayuso then asks them what made them want to be outside, how they came to be here. One said:

“I was a city person, but when I went on my first camping experience, it opened my eyes. I was so against it at first, but when I go on these trips, I’m so happy.”

Another student reminisced about her first time camping and how waking up outside was so special.

“The last time we went camping, my friend and I woke up at 5 a.m., and waking up to the morning dew, the smell of morning dew … it was so nice,” she said.

“It’s a break from the city, life with social media, everything feeling so controlled … when you’re outdoors, you’re on your own,” another student added.

Ayuso smiled as the group continued their discussion about life, nature, and what the future holds.

“Ya’ll are gonna make me cry,” Ayuso said, laughing. “You’re making me feel all the feels. I’m blessed to be here, to be able to do this.”

Grace Kelly is a journalist for ecoRI News.

Grace Kelly: What's meant by the 'blue economy'?

The area within red is Narragansett Bay.

From ecoRI News (ecori.org)

Blue is the new green.

The term “blue economy” has been popping up in headlines and economic outlines with increasing frequency during the past 10 years. But what exactly does blue economy mean? And what does it specifically mean for Rhode Island, the self-proclaimed Ocean State? And, to further complicate matters, what does it mean in a COVID-19 world?

A report released in March by the University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography, URI’s Coastal Resources Center, and Rhode Island Sea Grant attempts to answer the first two questions — the coronavirus pandemic hadn’t yet emerged during the report’s research period.

Jennifer McCann, director of coastal programs at the Coastal Resources Center, said that state government asked her team to define Rhode Island’s blue economy.

“So I Googled it, of course, and you get the definition from the U.N. and from other big, global programs and from different countries, and then you look at the definitions from different states like California and Michigan, and then you can go down further, and even Cape Cod has a definition of the blue economy,” she said. “Then our team looked at what data was out there, and we interviewed more than sixty people to figure out what they thought Rhode Island’s blue economy is, and so now we have a different definition than anyone else.”

Turns out Rhode Island’s blue economy, which the report defines as “the economic sectors with a direct or indirect link to Rhode Island’s coasts and ocean — defense, marine trades, tourism and recreation, fisheries, aquaculture, ports and shipping, and offshore renewable energy” — has a boatload of potential.

According to the 86-page report, 6 percent to 9 percent of Rhode Islanders work within the state’s ocean-based economy, which is valued at more than $5 billion.

Each sector listed in the report’s definition brings its own strengths to the table.

Ocean-based tourism raked in a whopping $703.6 million in 2018.

According to a 2019 study by Bryant University, the shipping industry at the Quonset Business Park generates nearly 7 percent of the state’s gross domestic product.Narra

The defense industry in Rhode Island uses certain areas of Narragansett Bay as testing grounds for new underwater technologies.

“The U.S. Navy owns an underwater tracking range located in Narraganset Bay. It is a testbed for undersea technology prototypes,” Molly Donohue Magee, executive director of the Middletown-based Southeastern New England Defense Industry Alliance, wrote in an email to ecoRI News. “The Naval Undersea Warfare Center has hosted an annual event, Advanced Naval Technology Exercise (ANTX) where companies can demonstrate their technology and prototypes to Navy engineers and the fleet.”

She goes on to note that ocean technology is the next big thing, and it will provide the state with an opportunity to strengthen its blue economy.

“Rhode Island is the hub of undersea technology,” she wrote. “It’s the home of the Naval Undersea Warfare Center, the Department of Defense’s research laboratory for undersea technology. There are many companies in Rhode Island and the region with unique technology related to the undersea environment. The ocean is the next frontier.”

Catherine Puckett is the owner of the Block Island business Oyster Wench, a shellfish and kelp farm operation. (Coastal Resources Center)

Deep blue economy

In addition to the obvious sectors of the blue economy, McCann made sure to note there are parts of it that might not seem so apparent, like advocacy groups such as Save The Bay or state agencies such as the Coastal Resources Management Council (CRMC).

“[Y]ou can’t forget about the marine-focused advocacy and civic groups,” McCann said. “And then you look at the role our government agencies have been playing whether it be Real Jobs RI working directly with marine trades and defense and building capacity, or CRMC who is designing our coast so we can have a pristine environment as well as a working waterfront.”

A big takeaway from the recent report, as well as from the state’s most-recent long-term economic development plan, which was approved in January, is that there is room for improvement.

During a January Rhode Island Commerce Corporation meeting that discussed the long-term economic development plan, titled Rhode Island Innovates 2.0 and written by Bruce Katz, Gov. Gina Raimondo is quoted as saying, “Basically, his analysis is: ‘Listen, you’ve made a lot of progress the past few years. But still a relatively small portion of our economy is what I would call advanced — high wage, high skill.’”

The governor went on to say that the state needs to do more to advance the education and skill of the average Rhode Islander.

Tide is high
While growing the blue economy was already seen as somewhat of an uphill battle, the coronavirus pandemic has thrown another obstacle in the way.

For instance, as of April 24, Discover Newport, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting the city of Newport and its ocean-centric tourism industry, had laid off 18 of its 22 employees, and expects to see a fall in annual revenue from $3.7 million to a little over a $1 million.

A variety of organizations that fall within the blue economy, such as Rhode Island Marine Trade Association, the Rhode Island Hospitality Association, Polaris MEP, and the Southeastern New England Defense Industry Alliance, have recently banded together to try to revive the economic momentum lost.

For McCann, this collaboration was always essential to a thriving blue economy, even before the virus took its economic and public-health toll.

“We need to work together,” she said. “That’s the way we are going to sustainably grow our state. If we just focus on economics or higher-ed, we’re not efficiently moving forward for sustainable growth in our state.”

Grace Kelly is an ecoRI News reporter.

Grace Kelly: Reef balls deposited to lure sport fish

Reef balls being dropped into an area to lure fish in the Gulf of Mexico

From ecoRI News (ecori.org)

EAST PROVIDENCE, R.I.

The mayor, a slew of media members, and a group of residents celebrating a birthday — complete with cake and party hats — gathered Oct. 24 at Sabin Point here, at the head of Narragansett Bay, to watch not one, but 64 balls, drop.

But unlike the ball drop to kick off the New Year, these balls are more like dome-shaped mounds, flat on the bottom, made of concrete and silica and hollow, three feet high and four feet wide, and with large holes gouging their surfaces. Their purpose: bring sport fish to Sabin Point.

These balls will create an artificial reef, the first of its kind in Rhode Island, as a result of a partnership between The Nature Conservancy and the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management (DEM).

“Part of this work began four years ago when DEM and The Nature Conservancy partnered up to start monitoring the upper bay, and through this we decided this location would be good for fish enhancement since it has access to fish by shore, not just by boat,” said Patrick Barrett, a DEM fisheries specialist. “The money used for this was raised and provided by taxes on fishing gear, so we’re trying to give back to the community.”

Specialty Diving transported the 64 reef balls via barge from Quonset Point to Sabin Point.

Many sport fish, specifically tautog, scup, and sea bass, like structured spaces, and, according to Tim Mooney of The Nature Conservancy, the reefs will allow minnows the security to grow into adulthood.

“The reefs should attract these fish and we’re hoping that it will increase their survival rate,” he said.

As part of the installation, DEM and The Nature Conservancy will monitor the progress in this location against other areas in the bay.

“We will be monitoring this area once a month, and every fall we’ll probably dive the reef as well,” Barrett said. “We’re interested to see what happens.”

Grace Kelly is an ecoRI News journalist.
Editor’s note: Supports for offshore wind turbines also attract fish.