The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has rejected an attempt by commercial fishermen to stop a large-scale offshore wind energy development project.
Vineyard Wind, which is to be located off the coast of the U.S. state of Massachusetts, is intended to be an 800-megawatt project built across 75,000 acres. The lawsuit, originally filed in 2022, was filed by the Responsible Offshore Development Alliance (RODA) against several federal agencies, including the U.S. Department of the Interior, U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), and NOAA Fisheries and claimed the agencies took shortcuts past statutory and regulator requirements intended to protect the environment.
That lawsuit was dismissed in October 2023 after the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts ruled RODA didn’t have standing to sue the agencies. RODA appealed the case to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld that dismissal on 5 December, effectively ending the alliance’s challenges against the project.
"Today, RODA is extremely disappointed following the First Circuit Appellate Court’s issuance of a ruling regarding the Vineyard Wind 1 offshore wind energy project,” RODA wrote in a release following its loss.
RODA had argued that when federal agencies approved the project, they failed to comply with federal laws, including considering the project’s potential impact on endangered species like the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale.
“Despite the comments and data available regarding the significant losses fisheries will suffer and that these losses could have been mitigated, the project was approved at the expense of fisheries,” the original lawsuit stated.
The appeals court ...
