The potential impact of power-generating windmills off New Jersey's coast include the death of shorebirds and noise levels that might disturb marine animals, said a state-authorized study of off-shore generators released Friday.
Consultants for the state Department of Environmental Protection drafted the 312-page report, contending wind farms may limit recreational and commercial fishing and boating, disrupt marine life because of the current running through large electrical lines and temporarily destroy fish habitats as they are constructed. But they also said the turbine infrastructure eventually would act as artificial habitat for some fish, improving their survival.
The report's release stirred debate over Gov. Jon Corzine's policy push to use alternative, clean energy sources, which critics say will cause trouble for the ocean ecology.
Corzine wants wind farms to supply 1,000 megawatts of electricity, enough to power about 375,000 homes, by 2012 and increase the projected wind capacity by 2020 to 3,000 megawatts to supply about 1 million homes. Last year, a joint venture between a private Hoboken developer and a subsidiary of Public Service Enterprise Group was chosen by the state to start building a 346-megawatt wind farm about 20 miles off the Jersey Coast.
"This report again raises a red flag that there are a number of natural resources that would be affected by a large scale industrial windmill development, and that caution is being thrown to the wind by the Corzine administration," said Tim Dillingham of the American Littoral Society, an ocean and avian conservation group.
But the New Jersey Sierra Club, which supports the state's windmill efforts, claims key parts in the report entitled, "Ocean/Wind Power Ecological Baseline Studies," indicate less wildlife is impacted the farther out to sea the windmills are constructed.
"It is the most important part of the report, although it failed in part to consider and also include the doctrine of avoidance. As Europe has found with its windmill research, the birds and other creatures eventually go around the windmills--avoid them," said Jeff Tittel of Sierra.
Ecological impacts of off-shore windmills worried the special state panel that first considered the turbines. In its April 2006 report to Corzine that, the panel concluded that offshore wind turbines could be a part of New Jersey's long-term energy solution, but it recommended a pilot project be created and only after a baseline study on the offshore natural resources that would be impacted.
The baseline study drew no conclusions, but found that there is a lack of data on the various numbers of marine mammals and other fish life off the Jersey coast. Many of the potential impacts cited in the report were drawn from research elsewhere in the world where wind turbines already have been erected.
"The collision of birds with wind turbines is one of the most recognized ecological impacts surrounding the use of wind energy," the report stated, concluding a "death rate of between one and two birds per turbine, per year.