[Intro Music] We live on a planet which has greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

We are grateful to those greenhouse gases because they keep the temperature of the planet at a level which supports life as we know it.

Extracting, processing, and combusting fossil fuels is increasing the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

And what this does is simply increase the capacity of our atmosphere to retain heat.

Yes.

So when we look at sustainability in terms of energy, we can see finite resources such as coal, such as oil that we're using up, and these resources are depleting.

But it's not just about the fact that they're not gonna be there forever.

It's also that these resources tend to have health and well-being impacts, causing climate change as well as local pollution.

It's gonna have to be a transition to renewable energy.

We have tremendous potential in the state and are producing solar.

We're producing wind.

About half of our electricity is actually hydro.

We're looking at renewable hydrogen, our geothermal options, and we're looking at offshore wind.

It's far more sustainable and a better choice for all, but we need to change the systems so we're working to those systems.

At the moment, we have the infrastructure very much so for nonrenewable energy.

Why are we making these decisions?

Can we learn from decisions we've made in the past, where we've caused pollution, where we've had a negative impact on society?

The planet will go on without us, so it's up to us to decide what role we want to have on this planet.

Energy Horizons is made possible in part by the Elizabeth Maughan Charitable Foundation, The Four Way Community Foundation, and by the Members of Southern Oregon PBS.

Thank you.

The Oregon coast is among the most renowned coastlines on Earth.

Stretching 362 miles from the California border to the mouth of the Columbia River, the coast boasts ample opportunities for outdoor recreation, supports a robust fishing industry, and holds countless legends from history.

Oregonians are proud of the coast and protective of it.

The wind here is strong and full of energy.

The federal government and prospective developers are interested in this wind to curb America's reliance on fossil fuels and to meet rising energy demands.

Our team is traveling up and down the Oregon coast, attending a conference of experts and speaking with fishing industry and tribal leaders to try to gain a better understanding of offshore wind, which may be one of Oregon's biggest environmental opportunities, but which is also becoming one of Oregon's biggest environmental controversies.

This is America's Windy Hill, one of the windiest places in the United States.

Here, for more than 60% of the time, the wind blows at speeds in excess of 25 kilometers an hour, much of the time at speeds up to 90 kilometers an hour.

So it was the logical place for this country's first wind farm.

The first ones they built up in the gorge were these gigantic things that were built by NASA, and they were, like 3 megawatts each.

Today marks the start, we believe, of a new age for the Pacific Northwest.

Three, two, one.

Mark.

And they were just too bulky and cumbersome.

They didn't know how to work them.

Then they shrunk them down.

They then went to, like, 500, 800, 1,000, 1,500 Now they're back up to 3 megawatts.

Back in the early '80s, me and a couple other folks started Renewable Northwest project, now Renewable Northwest, and its goal was to get more renewables in the northwest.

They had a push goal of getting 400 megawatts of wind in the northwest.

Now we have upwards of 9,000 megawatts of wind in in the northwest.

They're still building them.

They're becoming more efficient.

They're becoming bigger and cheaper, and so wind has become a big part of it.

It's not everywhere.

It's in places that have high winds, and people often misunderstand what high winds mean.

High winds mean really strong winds, And usually, they're up there, so that's why these turbines are way up in the air.

At the ground level and up 250 feet in the air they are very different.

Northern California, Southern Oregon is the Saudi Arabia of wind.

It's got incredibly good resource for wind.

Research, really looking at different organizational scenarios, for offshore wind.

My name's Jason Bush, and I'm the executive director of POET Pacific Ocean Energy Trust, the nonprofit that's putting on this event today.

And our mission is to promote ocean based climate solutions, like wave energy, tidal energy, and here in the last few years, offshore wind, which is the topic of today's conference.

I wanna go ahead and invite the next panel before lunch.

Well, every story about offshore wind kinda starts with the resource, and for good reason.

Because we have a resource off of Northern California and Southern Oregon, really from San Francisco to Coos Bay.

It's a very high quality resource, really a world class wind resource.

Offshore wind showed up on the East Coast several years ago after already, you know, maybe 15, 20 years of development in Europe.

It is a global sector.

In the last 5 years, Asia has really come on strong with offshore wind, including China, which is now the leading producer of offshore wind in the world, so even more than the United Kingdom, which has been by far the leader until recently.

My name is Jean Thurston-Keller.

I'm with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.

We're one of nine agencies under the Department of the Interior responsible for the development of our nation's energy and mineral resources on the outer continental shelf, so in federal waters.

BOEM, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, starting a few years ago was authorized legislatively to start permitting marine energy.

Our nation's energy needs are increasing over time.

For a long time, we were focused on one primary source of energy, which was oil and gas.

And now we're looking as a nation towards more renewable sources of energy.

In January of 2021, at the beginning of the new administration, president Biden issued his executive order on tackling the climate crisis at home and abroad.

A major part of this order was a call for the United States to deploy 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030.

We generally speak in terms of megawatts or gigawatts.

A gigawatt is a lot of power, it's 1,000 megawatts, and is the equivalent of a large sized coal facility or a nuclear facility, one reactor, about about a gigawatt.

The Hoover Dam is 2 gigawatts.

Between now and 2050, we need about 300 gigawatts of new generation.

And that's to replace aging infrastructure and generation that's going offline.

It's for new generation to meet the growing demand for clean electricity.

Offshore wind might be able to meet 10 or 20 percent of that along the entire West Coast.

In spring of 2023, BOEM finalized selection of two wind energy areas off the Oregon coast.

The Coos Bay WEA, 32 miles offshore, and the Brookings WEA, 18 miles offshore.

These are the regions of ocean where wind energy could soon be deployed.

In offshore wind, the offshore wind we started in Oregon in 2020.

We did a great value study.

There's scientific consensus on the warming of the planet, and it's caused by human factors.

We need significant change to meet the challenge.

That's why we're decarbonizing the mix.

We, in our study, have seen that there's a compelling reason to think about offshore wind as part of that mix.

We can't just do it with the the land based renewables we have today.

There's an importance to the complementarity of the resources, the firmness of that generation in terms of stability of the system.

We need this fleet that complements other sources in the fleet and also is complementary to loads.

The East Coast is reasonably well advanced.

Our first project was built probably 7 years ago.

Just this year, we've had 2 utility scale projects enter construction.

We have a lot of contracts, a long term agreement from electric utilities to purchase the output for the project.

That's critical because that's how these projects get financed.

These are billion dollar projects.

Just as Oregon has, we have ambitious clean energy objectives.

In the US Northeast, we have relatively modest amounts of onshore wind, and developing large utility scale solar projects is very difficult.

Offshore wind is gonna have to play a critical role.

It is represents an economic resource to allow us to achieve our clean energy goals.

It started on the East Coast.

Virtual, at least for now, everything is still bottom mounted or fixed, as they say, which means the turbine is attached to the seabed somehow.

And that's pretty good out to about 60 meters of depth.

But beyond that, for both economic and technical reasons, it makes more sense to try a floating platform of some form or some sort of floating component that you adhere the wind turbine to.

Unlike the East Coast, which has kind of a flat shelf on the Atlantic, the Pacific shelf just drops off.

The ocean floor is way down there.

It's not really practical to attach things to the floor of the ocean.

And so they put floating offshore wind platforms out there, and there will be a big wind turbines, and they'll gather the cables up and bring that back to land and put it into the transmission system.

It's pretty nascent technology, but it's something that has an enormous amount of potential.

I think one challenge is there isn't the same level of experience.

We have tens of thousands of megawatts of fixed foundation offshore wind.

The volume of floating offshore wind is in the several hundred megawatts.

Advancing nascent technologies like floating offshore wind requires real world experience and experimental research.

Institutions like Oregon State University at the Hinsdale Wave Research Laboratory are working on scale model testing platforms to learn about the best ways of building next generation floating technology before deploying life-sized installations in the real ocean.

We're in the initial stages of, a new test campaign where we'll be testing floating offshore wind devices.

Our question here is characterizing the stability of different platforms.

For the existing set of technologies we have, that's been done really well.

But as we look out 10, 20, 30 years when we wanna develop the next generation of platforms, we should test those.

This is called a semi sub platform.

It's 1 to 45th scale, so the full size device would be 45 times bigger.

It's something small.

It's modular.

We instrument it with load cells.

We instrument it with a whole suite of sensors.

We'll pick that up.

We'll put it in the tank, and then we'll make waves that are 1/45th times smaller.

So you actually are able to really capture all the dynamics.

They stay true whether you're at 1/45th or at full scale.

The dynamics scale really well.

So it allows us to get a lot of really good data on the next generation of technologies.

The ocean is a fairly corrosive environment.

It is seawater.

It does not like your traditional steels.

You have to account for both corrosion and growth.

Marine life likes to grow on things anything in the ocean.

So we've got this sort of combined effect of a lot of traditional materials will corrode, and they sort of really increase a lot of growth on the device.

So we have to look at new materials to build devices out of, new ways to access them.

So if it's an incredibly stormy period for a month, two months, how do we access these devices?

Do we use drones?

Do we use underwater vehicles?

How do we do it in a way that we can continue to operate these technologies without the ability to access them with humans?

But that's exciting.

Take something from robotics, something from AI, something from drone technology, something from deployment of novel anchors.

It's really bringing a really multidisciplinary lens to a single challenge.

We have another decade before these machines are actually gonna be deployed in the United States.

And so we have the benefit of the projects that are tracking around the world that are are using the floating.

Before we ever put anything in the water here, we're going to have, you know, 10 or 15 years of experience of other nations developing this technology, and we can learn from that.

Turbines that we're using at sea, both in the fixed as well as in the floating, are getting ever larger.

If you drive through the gorge and you see the wind turbines there on the hillsides, most of those are less than 3 megawatts.

3, historically, has been about as big as you see on land, And that's a function of moving the components down the road or getting the crane up the side of the hill.

So, you know, there are limitations, transportation limitations.

With offshore wind, though, you don't really have those.

Everything's happening near shore and it's on on ships.

And so, the turbines today are now pushing 18 megawatts.

The bigger the turbine, the larger the windswept area.

And that, of course, diffutes how much energy is produced from the wind turbine.

And one of the beauties of this is that the bigger the turbine, essentially, the lower the cut in speed, that's the lowest speed the thing spin, and the higher the cut out speed, that's the maximum speed you want it to spin for precautionary reasons.

You don't want it to spin too quickly.

And so that broader range of viable wind speeds creates a broader range of functioning for the wind turbine.

Those numbers will just continue to increase because they get ever more efficient with their size.

Also, the further out to sea you are and higher up in the air you are, really the stronger the wind blows and the more consistent it blows.

And I don't know if you've covered the size of these structures, but a single structure, the base of the float is about the size of a stadium.

It's gonna be a turbine with 3 blades, each one of those blades is as long as a football field.

You're probably going to have about a 100, 125 of those large structures in an array and several arrays within a lease to meet these megawatt, gigawatt goals that they're putting forth.

This has never been done.

These structures are very large.

They've never built them at this size.

They've never built these turbines of this size.

And we've never cited these things in the waters that we're talking about.

That's a lot of unknowns, which makes me as a scientist very interested on what are the potential effects of having these structures.

Due to the unknowns which surround floating offshore wind, stakeholders in coastal communities are expressing concern.

Among them is the Coos tribe.

We're commonly referred to as the Coos tribe.

However, we're made up of 3 different tribes.

The Coos, actually 2 bands, Miluk and Hanais Coos, and the Lower Umquah tribe, and, Siuslaw, which I am a Siuslaw member.

And we're a coastal tribe.

We are from the ocean, and we live by the ocean.

Early on, we were supporting the project with some reservations.

You know, we want to make sure it's a responsible project.

We'd passed an initial resolution back in 2020 supporting the project with with those reservations.

We need answers on our questions, and our questions are, what's the potential impacts to the environment, to the fish, salmon, lamprey.

In 2022, we passed a second resolution based on what was happening at the time and the fact that we weren't getting those those responses and those answers with more reservation.

And then we still weren't getting answers and so more recently we passed the third resolution opposing the project until those answers can be provided.

We support the idea of renewable energy.

We don't support destroying our environment doing it.

It's unlike anything that's ever been done.

It's done right in some of our prime fishing areas.

We have concerns, deep concerns, about what those environmental impacts might be because we don't know, and BOEM doesn't know, and they can't answer those questions for us.

And that's all we're asking for is answers to those questions and if those impacts can be mitigated.

Fundamentally, you don't want this to end up being that the Oregon coast is an experiment to find out what happens Yes.

If you put a bunch of wind turbines out there.

Exactly.

What does it mean to put all these structures out in the water that is typically called the coastal outwelling zone?

This is where we have deep waters coming up from depth that's nutrient rich that fuels the productivity in in these phytoplankton and zooplankton communities, which feeds pelagic fish.

That's why some of these areas overlap with really, I would call, hot spots for fishing, which creates conflicts.

Midwater trawlers cooperative represents 33 trawl vessels that fish Pacific whiting, rockfish, flatfish here off the West Coast, and then we have vessels that spend part of their year up in Alaska called the Oregon's distant water fleet, and they're fishing for pollock and cod in the Gulf of Alaska and the Bering Sea.

Most of my boats are home ported out of Newport, but they are boats that come down here to fish, and they fish in the areas being considered for wind energy.

We've been trying to get BOEM to really work with us to see that these are prime fishing grounds.

We won't be able to fish there.

What are the potential environmental impacts?

People get a little bit confused about that because they say, well, this is renewable energy, and we have a climate crisis.

And and that's true.

I'm not denying we have a climate crisis, but our concerns are around what could this do to the upwelling offshore.

We're one of four unique places in the world that has the type of upwelling and habitat that's out there.

What could this do?

When you think about the dams, you think this was really great when they went in.

It was renewable energy.

It was inexpensive when we got those things.

We put salmon on the path to extinction, and we've spent billions of taxpayer dollars trying to fix that, and we don't wanna see that happen in the ocean.

So our main concerns are being pushed out of our historical fishing grounds where my vessels have caught millions of pounds of sustainable seafood, but we're as concerned, if not more concerned, about the potential environmental impacts.

And so we need to know what those are before we move forward.

Large structures in the ocean in an upwelling zone, just the sheer presence of that structure slows those currents that go across it.

These structures are in the open ocean.

They'll attract fish.

They'll be encrusted by invertebrates, worms even, forming this secondary community on the bottom like an artificial reef, just upside down.

That'll feed the fish that are attracted, which will attract bigger fish, which will attract bigger fish, and then all of a sudden you have a functioning sort of quasi coral reef community.

That means that the way that system worked before is going to be changed at at least at a very small regional level.

What that effect is, we really don't know.

We don't really have enough information to say so, but it'll likely change.

And that affects your fisheries end users that are targeting mid water pelagic fish.

Fishes that feed into making fish sticks.

We all like fish sticks and it's a good high quality protein, low fat and has good shelf life.

So it's an important fishery not only for this region economically, but for the world when we think about food security.

What kind of boats are these primarily that we're looking at here?

These are crabbers.

Crabbers, salmon trawlers, bottom trawlers.

So the boat's empty so they're up high.

Yeah.

It takes climbing up a ladder.

And the deck could be just a little slick here with all the rain.

Trawling is where you fish with a net pulled behind the boat.

Lots of times, a trawl vessel, you can tell because they have a ramp on the back called the stern ramp, and that's to pull the net up.

Over here, we have the net reel on the back of the boat.

So whenever you see this kind of thing here, just this big spool, basically, that's a sign that it's a trawling boat.

Yeah.

And I always say you can't throw a rock in a fishing town without hitting someone that has something to do with fishing.

And if you drive through these coastal towns, like, during little league season, almost every team is sponsored by a fishing boat.

Like, it's that much a part of our lives here on the coast.

So it's a huge part of the economy.

A lot of people talk about tourism, and that is a big part.

But particularly for places like Charleston and Newport, tourists are coming to see the active working waterfront.

They wanna be immersed in that and see that, and I think that that's super cool.

We've tried to educate folks, tried to educate BOEM about how a trawl works and how much space you need to put the net down.

And, like, you would never be able to fish in a wind farm.

There's just no way.

No one's gonna risk their gear being in there.

You know, fishermen have a lot of regulations, places you can fish, places you can't, gear that's legal, gear that's not, places that have higher incidental catch you don't want.

So I've had people say, well, just move.

Well, that's not how it works.

Or they'll say, well, if you can't fish anymore, you can use your boat to bring supplies to and from the wind farm.

Besides being deeply offensive, it just shows how little people understand or appreciate the sustainable seafood industry that Oregon has.

Stakeholder concerns are primarily grounded in how offshore wind will impact coastal resources and logistics.

At no point in our conversations did the tribe or fishermen mention aesthetics.

In fact, after our interview, members of the Coos tribal government emphasized to our team that impact on view was one of their least serious concerns.

But people do wonder about how installing giant wind turbines will affect the way the Oregon coast looks.

These call areas and the eventual lease areas, they're far offshore.

People who are worried about seeing these things largely need to step back and think about the distances we're talking about here.

So if you stand at the beach at Brookings, if you stand at Harris Beach and you look out, you know, there's a lighthouse out there, and on a really clear day, you can definitely see that lighthouse.

The call area would start beyond that.

Something to think about is if you get beyond that quite a ways, you really don't see these too well.

I mean, it'd be pretty hard to see them.

You'd have to be really looking for them.

The long distance out to sea will make turbines difficult to spot from land, especially with how often the Oregon coast is obscured by weather.

But the open ocean is a treacherous environment.

Off the southern Oregon coast, we've been working for a hundred years to create a weather buoy that doesn't break off unsuccessfully.

Fishermen are like, this is insane.

How can this even work?

And the cost to keep those maintained and out there regardless of environmental impacts and other things?

There's just so many questions.

Yeah, no it's an honest question.

I think the one slight difference is the the economics or the amount of money you're gonna spend when you're putting an offshore wind system in, you're gonna spend a lot more money making sure it stays on-site.

For a weather buoy, if you lose a weather buoy that costs you fifty, a hundred k. If you lose an offshore wind system, that's a hundred, two hundred million.

Your scale of investment to make sure it stays on-site is associated much much higher.

In addition, a lot of the technology we're looking at right now is coming from offshore oil and gas, which has a very strong history of keeping the devices on-site.

Now I'm not gonna talk about their other environmental impact.

But in terms of keeping facilities on-site and mooring and anchoring them, they're very robust.

We've also learned a lot from shore based wind in terms of keeping those working really reliably.

And we're sort of taking an oil and gas platform that we've got a lot of knowledge and data and history of reliability, and we're putting a shore based wind turbine.

There's no tougher environment than saltwater.

And then just 17 foot waves, 65 knot winds.

There's been times where there's 30 foot waves down there.

So how will they physically stand that?

We've just gotta look at what's happening around the world and have an adaptive management scheme.

So if we learn that a floating offshore wind turbine in Korea and Europe failed for some significant reason, We need to bring that data and that information to bear really, really quickly.

There's a lot of data sharing happening.

We're trying to formalize that at least at the academic level to make sure that we're all collaborating and sharing best practices because it's in no one's best interest if these things fail.

We wanna make sure they're out there reliably.

And if they aren't, let's pull them out.

The one issue that I think we're all concerned about is bird impacts.

Spinning blades and bird flying birds don't have a nice relationship.

Right?

It doesn't end well.

We've learned a lot of lessons from that in terrestrial wind.

And today, bird mortality from terrestrial wind is far less than it was just 10 or 15 years ago.

We've learned where to put wind turbines.

There are new technologies that can better monitor.

And of course, mostly we're talking about seabirds, and especially migratory seabirds.

So this is a kind of issue that very much deserves ongoing assessment.

National Audubon has been fairly clear about offshore wind, with the caveat that, you know, it clearly needs to be developed thoughtfully.

The risk to seabirds and the minimal impact that will occur from that is far better scenario than unabated climate change and its impacts on habitat, which will have much more drastic impacts on bird populations in the long term than individual strike.

The Oregon Coastal Caucus signed a letter requesting a pause till they can address concerns.

We have a letter from several senators and representatives asking the same thing.

Affiliated tribes of Northwest Indians have asked basically the same thing.

National Congress of American Indians, same thing.

So and there have been local proclamations asking for pauses.

It's not just us.

Initially, to have the towers a minimum of 18 miles off the Oregon coast as opposed to having them on land.

I thought, you know, that's worth a look.

The industry coming to your community, we need to do our homework here, do our research and determine if that's some sales pitch or if there really is some merit to it.

I was a little bit warm 4 years ago on and offshore, and then I got to a point where I'm, you know, agnostic, and now I'm really opposed to it.

I've spent so much time on salmon and steelhead recovery.

Being on the Rogue River so many years, I know every guide there is, and they can't survive without good quantities of fish.

And when Jedediah Smith come through here 20 years after the Lewis and Clark expedition, what did he find?

Again, back to these incredibly pristine rivers, and the fish were so thick he used to say, I could walk on the back of the salmon and not get my feet wet.

We're losing that resource.

When the salmon need to come back in the river, so you let's say you have these giant cables on the ocean floor, What kind of signal they're gonna be putting off, or system, magnetic pulse, we'll say, that could disrupt the navigation system of the salmon steelhead?

So nobody's been able to answer that.

Sure as heck, BOEM, Bureau of Ocean Energy Management hasn't been able to answer it, so that is a really big one.

They're up in arms, and those are people I represent.

Those are people that are counting on me to make really good decisions.

If some of those questions had been answered or I was convinced, I could go to my citizens and say, hey, here's where we are.

I think we're okay.

Trust me on this.

I've really worked hard to get the right info, the right data.

But we're we're just so far from that, Keegan.

So far from that.

Maybe we should go into a covered area here.

It's very good.

Yep.

It's getting I see the camera's getting really wet.

Good.

That's the coast for you, though.

I mean And then just watch your guys' head in here.

But Alright.

You've been calling it sustainable seafood, but some people see trawling as not being sustainable.

They're like, oh, you're gonna overfish the ocean.

This type of industrial fishing is bad anyway.

So who are you to say that wind turbines will be bad?

What do you kind of think of that argument when people make that assertion about fishing?

There is so much misinformation about trawling right now.

Today's trawler is not the same as 20, 30, 40 years ago.

It's just not.

The wheelhouses and the MTC vessels have things to find fish, things to avoid certain kinds of habitat.

All my vessels, the the fisheries they're in, they're one 100 percent monitored at sea and at the dock.

The things that people suggest, what it says to me is they don't understand fishing.

A lot of Oregon families are multigenerational fishing families.

They're not owned by processors.

They're still independent boats.

Fathers are passing these businesses on to their daughters and sons.

I think at least 50 percent or more of my members have sons and daughters that are taking over.

If this wasn't sustainable, we wouldn't be here for the fifth generation.

You Know?

There's more fish out there.

I use my great grandfather's toe out there where we go, and, you know, I bet I'd catch him just as much, if not more, than what he has.

And, you know, that's 50 years ago.

People like Ty, fifth generation.

I mean, that is awesome.

Keeping that going and keeping that family spirit is really part of what makes this whole industry and being here on the Oregon coast just a joy to be around.

We want to better ourselves, you know, and we want that to be there the next year.

And I have a long time left in this, and hopefully, someday my kids can be able to come to it.

We're here for the long run.

We're not here for the short run.

I mean, this is what we have, and we plan on sticking around for a long time.

Now, I don't speak for the fishing industry.

I did commercially fish in Alaska.

I have some sense of the value they place on their their livelihood.

I enjoyed it when I was there.

That was amazing.

Folks are concerned that offshore wind is just the latest thing that's going to affect their ability to fish.

I wish there was a better dialogue happening right there.

It's not really happening.

It's just sort of this blanket assertion that offshore wind is just going to destroy the fisheries, and and that's it.

I've heard the phrase, you know, an organ has a choice between sustainable fisheries and offshore wind.

That's not true.

You know, that's just not been the case in Europe, and it's not gonna be the case here.

Clearly, there is a need to address the concerns directly.

We're installing large infrastructure in the ocean.

It's not entirely benign.

Right?

Now, as a climate person, to me, it's pretty clear what the right answer is here.

Compared to climate change and the very well understood impacts that are going today, versus the potential impacts that are being talked about in terms of concerns, it's apples and oranges.

Right?

The climate impact and the concerns of that and the very real impacts are far greater on so many levels than anything we could see from deployment of offshore wind.

I think that, mister Bush and other folks like him use that excuse for pushing forward.

I think there has to be better ways.

It's not about denying there's a climate crisis.

It's about not making it even worse than it already is.

Climate change happens.

I am not a climate change denier.

It's happened forever.

So whether we can change that by putting out some wind turbines out in the ocean and foregoing all the other consequences, that does not sound responsible to me.

I do respect mister Bush.

He's very, very knowledgeable.

But sometimes people use, and I'm not saying he's guilty of this, but they use the climate change for political leverage.

If that's not the best thing for the citizens, then I'm gonna stomp my foot and say, no, sir.

That is not right.

Has your industry noticed effects from climate change?

We've seen fish showing up in different areas than they've been before in different amounts than they've been before.

So some, we call climate change winners because they're just exploding like black cod, and some, like snow crab up in the Bering Sea, are losers because they have disappeared.

So it really depends where you're at, but we certainly do see changes taking place.

We're focused on the fact that the BOEM process was really flawed, and stakeholders do not have a seat at the table.

It is driven largely by developers and by BOEM whose job and mission it is to lease out ocean land.

Offshore wind, if you talk to the proponents, certainly is essential to us getting to our renewable energy goals.

But there are also other worries about that, that we have fishermen who are worried about what the impact is going to be on places where they go.

We have tribes wondering what the impact is gonna be on the tribal interests.

We have local people wondering if they're gonna be run over by the federal government when they come in.

There's no such thing as an environmentally benign energy resource, period.

They've instituted several areas in Northern California where they're actually gonna be building these things very soon.

They've gone through that process and figured out how to make the projects go forward.

Probably not make everybody happy, but make the projects go forward.

Right now in Oregon, we're at the very very beginning of that.

We have a very robust regulatory process that does the best that it can to protect the environment.

It is not without flaws.

Part of what BOEM does is pre vet these lease areas.

Through their selection process, they start with a big area, and then they look, okay, what are the wind fields like?

Well, there's no wind there, so we're not gonna put it there.

What are the fisheries like?

Well, there's really important fishery there, so we're gonna whittle that part off.

What about Department of Defense?

Do they use any part of this?

Well, we can't interfere with that, so we take this part off.

So just whittle, it down whittle it down, till you're left with this potential wind evaluation area.

We have a robust process, that really engages states, the state government, the public through input and stakeholder outreach and engagement, as well as compliance with several, overlapping laws and jurisdictions with other federal and state agencies.

Typically, there's some work that's done to say, is offshore wind gonna be economic in this market?

Does it represent a good fit for the resource need that we have?

So we have a planning and analysis phase where we work a lot with the states to really understand and identify what areas appear to be the most suitable for offshore wind energy development.

If it does appear to be economic, what's the type of infrastructure that we need to support these offshore wind projects?

These turbines are huge.

They require specially designed ports, specially designed ships.

Where would we interconnect it to the onshore grid?

What's gonna be the cost of that?

Who's gonna be the buyer for this?

And then we look at those areas with an environmental review, the rigorous NEPA evaluation under the National Environmental Policy Act.

After that, we get into our second phase, which is the leasing phase, which is where we publish proposed sale notices.

States, as well as the public, can look at potential community benefit agreements, fisheries agreements, as well as potential local labor agreements that can be incorporated into our process.

And then that goes into the auction itself.

An auction for leases where they would allow third party offshore wind project developers to compete on the right to lease different areas in the ocean.

Once BOEM issues a lease, a developer has up to 5 years to conduct survey plans, and then after that, they would provide a construction operations plan to BOEM.

The leases don't really do much except guarantee them the first in time right to try to develop a project.

So once they get the leases, then they begin the real heavy work of much better detailed site assessment to understand everything about that location and what's happening there, designing their facilities, they're designing with a project, exactly what turbine are they gonna use, how are they gonna configure them, what kind of foundation are they gonna use, how are they gonna moor them, what kind of cables are they gonna use.

All those decisions have to be planned out and developed.

That's also the period where the companies and the state and the local communities can begin having a dialogue about the details.

And it also includes, the negotiations that will ensue between the developer and communities themselves, and there's a long history of community benefit agreements that bring assets into that community to help that community in some way that's important to them.

The offshore wind companies are large international developers of projects.

They understand how these processes work.

They expect to work with local communities.

They expect to deal with potentially affected stakeholders who have concerns or actual impacts from offshore wind development, including agreements with fishermen's groups to compensate them for any reduced revenue they may experience as result of having to travel around these facilities.

You use more fuel, you use more time in transit.

These are of extra cost.

Now, those can be recorded and will compensate them for, these these impacts.

Now that's maybe an an imperfect solution, but it's a pretty good solution.

What the industry in Oregon has said is we don't wanna be paid off or bought out.

I'm a fifth generation fisherman.

This is my life, my livelihood.

I've got a lot of fishing left.

I'm a food provider.

I don't need a new gym and Reedsport as a trade off for losing my fishing grounds.

Right?

And, you know, I've heard folks say, well, we don't wanna be paid not to fish.

Well, that's not the deal.

Right?

You're not getting paid not to fish.

Everybody's still fishing.

You're just getting compensated if you have an impact.

That plays out over a 5 to 7 year period.

Once they've got their final permits, then they can begin to build and deploy.

The key part of this process is that it is a very thorough process, and it takes time.

So the timeline is not set in stone.

It's really depends on the state itself.

So in California, we had this process provide a lease sale that resulted in five leases being issued.

Oregon, we're at a different step in the process.

We're earlier in the process.

We're in the planning and analysis phase.

If we have areas that make it through the environmental review process, then we have a proposed sale notice.

And again, this is a really key inflection point for stakeholders and for the state to really look at what the lease would look like itself.

No construction is allowed at this point, just surveys.

And also allows for any community benefit agreements, what they would look like.

Due to the order of operations in BOEM's process for siting offshore wind development, a lot remains unknown in these early stages.

The questions about environmental impact that stakeholders have are, according to BOEM, going to be answered.

Just later, once leases have been granted and developers start generating more specific plans for physical turbine deployment.

Fishermen aren't necessarily anti offshore wind.

We've been against the process.

Not everything will be able to be answered, but there are fundamental things that we need to know before we move forward.

Our experience with BOEM is we've met with them a number of times.

What has been called consultation, they're personable.

We get along.

I enjoy conversation with them.

They listen to us, but they don't talk back.

We don't get answers.

So it's basically a listening session.

BOEM's been actively working with several West Coast tribes.

We do have a special obligation with federally recognized tribes for government to government consultation.

They're required by law to come and consult with us on these kinds of things, and they have done that as far as coming and talking to us.

But a consultation means that decision makers are at the table, and you work together to reach a common goal, and that's not happening.

One thing that California is doing that's a little different than what Oregon is doing is that after the wind energy areas are sort of figured out, but before we go through the lease, California as a state takes over part of that process.

And so they are taking steps to invite stakeholders like fisheries and tribes to give early input before the lease process.

They're just not an avenue here in Oregon because of the BOEM led process.

Does that make BOEM evil?

No.

They're just following their own rules.

Should the rules be changed?

Probably.

Because of this specific type of project.

BOEM really was about oil and gas leases and mines before it got into renewable energy.

This is an extension of what they have always done, but now we're trying to bring it into the next century, which means we probably should reevaluate how the process is done.

Well, BOEM was charged with developing offshore wind.

So they've come in, you know, like a little bit of a tornado, to use a wind analogy, to communities announcing that they would be doing offshore wind.

That's really not the way we do things in Oregon.

We sit down and we talk to people.

Or if it is the way that we do things, we too often have seen things blow up because people didn't feel like they got their issues answered.

So the governor's office and both senators Wyden and Merkley have both stepped into this and cautioned to Boehm that we need time for these conversations to take place.

You know, I think you can have wind energy.

We've got a lot of wind, and it's not just coast but other areas.

And I also think you can protect fishing families.

So I and senator Merkley and congresswoman Hoyle, we've all been involved in getting BOEM to do more to work with fishing families.

You have to have approaches that bring people, you know, together.

And to say here in Oregon, where we have tremendous wind and our fishing families are so important, well, we're just gonna wash our hands, we're gonna do one or the other, That's not my style.

My style is those are the kind of things you say, this is really important.

We're gonna have to find some common ground.

I mean, we sort of have no choice but to work out those issues and push back on the feds.

But, you know, that's their job, and it's the federal government.

And so I think it kind of by the nature of the approach, set people off a little bit.

And I've always said I'm not against offshore wind, but I'm getting there.

And a lot of people are because of the process has been so alienating.

You know, to have people like Tye take time off from fishing, go to these meetings, provide their track lines for where they fit, like, everything, and then have BOEM turn around and put a draft wind energy area rate in those places says that they're not listening.

They're going to do what they're going to do.

They have plenty of meetings.

What they do with the feedback is unclear, I think, to us.

And so we just don't feel that's authentic engagement.

So in the 2024 session, we passed a piece of legislation that will do two things.

One is it states that if these projects develop off the Oregon coast, we're going to have really good labor standards because we want to be able to say with truth that we are providing good jobs for people who who are Oregonians who are gonna work at those sites.

The second thing it does is it will develop a what we're calling a road map.

Really, that is an ongoing discussion among all these entities who have something to say to understand what communities need to get out of offshore wind development, what tribes need, and then to really hopefully weave that together into a narrative that talks about how Oregon will approach offshore wind and still leaves the door open to offshore wind.

But it's really important for people to have the chance to talk about their worries.

Governor Kotek has been responsive to that.

Between her, our coastal caucus, our federal legislators, they've all asked BOEM for a pause.

Technically, BOEM can do what they want in federal waters, but with these three groups hoping and pushing them to do it the right way, the Oregon way, we have slowed down the process significantly.

I and others, really diverse groups have come together to create the components of a road map.

Environmentalists, the fishing industry, developers, labor, marine scientists, all coming together to say these are the things that are important to Oregonians.

These are the things that have to be considered before we move forward with offshore wind.

So I think the way forward is this road map that has all these different considerations for the environment, for communities, for the transition to clean energy.

They have these questions that they want answered.

If those answers eventually come, but they're unsatisfactory, is no an option?

Can Oregon at large decide not to have offshore wind?

I think if Oregon said we don't want this, we would not have development.

You know, there are other places that will step in here.

There was already some concern around the fact that the feds were pushing so hard on Northern California that Oregon might be overlooked or we might get only one site.

So it's probably good news that we have two sites, but it's only good news if we figure out how to bring people into the conversation.

I'm personally not opposed to offshore wind.

If, if, I can be assured that those aren't gonna be catastrophic.

You should do the research and make a decision, a wise and informed decision.

There's consequences to everything you do, And so in every decision you make, you need to weigh the consequences against the benefits and make a wise decision.

There's already a 20 year history of offshore wind development.

In Europe today, there are many large ports that have built up massive infrastructure that are exclusively dedicated to offshore wind.

And we're only at the beginning of the industry.

That will play out now over the next 20, 30, 40 years, just for the deployment aspect.

And then those machines will run for 30, 40 years and with the potential to renew them.

It's far bigger than any community or port or state even.

It's a massive sector, and the components are coming from all around.

And it takes a lot of port infrastructure and manufacturing and labor to build these things and deploy them.

The local workforce has a major role in terms of the construction of these facilities.

And these are high paying jobs, you know, that can support families.

These facilities have 30 year lives.

So there's gonna be a need for a significant number of people to kind of operate and maintain the facilities, to go out and make sure that they continue to run.

That means that there are a couple of generations of workers that pretty much have their entire career in and around the offshore wind sector.

It's a great opportunity, and I hope that we can see clearer to making the most of that opportunity.

It's incumbent upon the offshore wind sector and the fisheries to come together and start talking.

That hasn't really happened.

Once the leases are solidified and there's a pathway forward and, you know, okay, this is happening, I hope at that point in time, we can be very thoughtful about this and proactive and figure out ways.

Not only might we find ways to mitigate impacts, but there may actually be some benefits from this.

There's a reason why that room over there is filled with a lot of folks from labor.

They see the opportunity.

On the other hand, if we said no, the feds would go on to someplace else, what that means is that we would not get the benefit of that power flowing into our state where we need it.

We would also not have the economic development implications and the jobs.

By the way, we're still at around 50 percent fossil fuels in Oregon, most of which is coming in from out of state.

We could have our own state resources.

We have our own in state resource in the form of offshore wind.

We're a relatively small piece of this whole thing, and yet it's really it could be really important to us, and it could be a significant contributor to the feds.

It's pretty clear that California is gonna have an offshore wind sector.

It looks like Washington is interested in having an offshore wind sector.

If Oregon doesn't move at the same pace as these other jurisdictions, it's gonna miss an opportunity.

The decision as to where these facilities are located to support the offshore wind sector are made in the early days.

So if Oregon isn't saying we're behind this, we're gonna support this, those facilities the vast majority of those facilities will be located in Washington and California.

And Oregon will miss out on the opportunity to get its fair share of these economic benefits.

Since completing our field reporting for this topic in summer of 2024, major developments have occurred.

After BOEM completed its NEPA evaluation and moved forward with a lease auction, the Coos tribe filed a lawsuit against the federal agency.

Subsequently, all but one eligible bidder withdrew, leading to the auction's indefinite postponement.

For now, the future of offshore wind in Oregon is extremely uncertain.

Whether this postponement amounts to a delay or a full blown cancellation will depend on Oregonian political will.

I think that, in the East Coast, we clearly have the political will.

We've invested hundreds of million dollars in terms of port infrastructure, put in place all the regulatory policy frameworks, have the procurement processes that are needed to award the long term power purchase agreement.

So it's pretty clear that the political will there exists.

I think looking at California, they clearly have the political will to support the development of offshore wind.

We've seen this in terms of the policies they've put in place.

We are at the cusp here.

I do feel like we're a little behind the power curve, but now's the time to act.

The attendants in the room there suggest that, there's a lot of folks that are starting to recognize that offshore wind is a very real opportunity for Oregon.

If we wanna make the most of the opportunity, then we need to step up and engage.

I'd love to see Oregon get the leases and start that really important conversation.

How do we make the most of the opportunity?

Because it's up to us to do that.

And so there are compelling reasons to do it.

At the same time, it's a transformational change.

It's we're talking about a really significant challenge.

And there's no way to do that while you leave people behind.

So it's very important that we bring people along and that we understand all the impacts to co-use.

So the concerns that we're hearing about generation of the resource, they are warranted and they need to be carefully studied and responded to because the scale of change that is needed can't be done without everyone.

We will explore all options to protect these lands.

And it's not just for us, not just for our tribes.

I believe that if we protect our tribes, we also protect the greater community.

I'm not saying that we could never have offshore wind.

Technology is always improving.

There has to be ways to minimize or avoid a lot of the concerns that people have Offshore wind is just one tool.

It just happens to be the narrow sliver of things that I focus on.

But it could be electric vehicles, it could be, you know, home heating mechanisms, it could be efficiency.

It's an endless array of new things, new ways to live.

So, yeah, I think we can make a difference.

I don't know if we can get out of the challenges.

I think that there are gonna be challenges here that we're gonna have to grapple with.

But I think that technology has an important role to play in terms of mitigating future damages and future risks.

I am someone who has quite a bit of faith in the ability of our species to innovate and to solve problems.

I'm hopeful, and I think one needs hope given the pretty dire environmental consequences that we're seeing.

You're simultaneously verbose and concise.

Like, you're speaking very completely, but you're not like just going on and on and on and on and on.

I'm blue but I'm red.

Yes.

Exactly.

No.

It's part of what I do.

I have to talk to a lot of people about lots of things at various levels of education and involvement.

I sense that the world is on the right path.

If we make some good decisions over the next few years here in the United States, I think we can gain back some of the steam, some of the vigor that we had as a nation to lead on things and do big things.

Offshore wind is a big thing.

It's a very big thing.

Comparable building the series of dams or the highway infrastructure or the grid.

You know, as a human of the, you know, the world, you you want to make the world better in a way.

I think we can all just be better as humans.

I'm a mother, so I do care deeply about the future for my kids and their kids.

I am optimistic because I think there are a lot of smart people.

The people that I surround myself with, we're always evolving.

We're always trying to do better.

I have to think that as humankind, we will continue to do better.

So with that, I'll just say thank you, and I look forward to working with you all over the next decade.