March 28, 2024

Plan Abandoned for Wind Turbine Farm

Great Bay Wind Energy Center abandoned plans to build a wind turbine farm in the Chesapeake Bay, blaming legislation of Sen. Barbara Mikulski’s (MD-D) as the ultimate, insurmountable obstacle.

A March 20, 2015 letter to the Somerset County Commission, in part, reads,

One of the most substantial obstacles . . .  occurred in August of 2014. At that time, U.S. Senator Mikulski added language to an unrelated piece of federal legislation that placed the entire Great Bay Wind investment and business into a state of uncertainty. After careful review and discussion with stakeholders, it is apparent that we are no longer able to proceed with our investment in any way in the near term. We are forced to thus place the project in indefinite suspension and as such we will not be requesting a permit for construction of the Great Bay Wind project in Somerset County at the current time or in the foreseeable future.

Somerset, Maryland officials approved an offshore wind farm in 2012,  but ran into opposition over concerns about the interference the turbines would create in unique radar testing done at the Mid-Atlantic Test Range located at Naval Air Station Patuxent River across the Chesapeake Bay.

As the turbine project continued to progress, former Del. John Bohanan authored legislation in 2014 and the full Southern Maryland Delegation sponsored the resulting bill seeking to delay construction until MIT could study the impact the turbines would have on the radar testing. The $2 million Massachusetts Institute of Technology study was to be completed in 2015.

The bill passed the 2014 legislative session with strong majorities in the Maryland House of Delegates and the Maryland Senate, but was vetoed by Governor Martin O’Malley in May.

“We knew they weren’t wild about it,” Mr. Bohanan said at the time, “but never any hint that it would be vetoed.”

In November the Department of Defense formally objected to the project as “an unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States.” The letter to the U.S. Department of Transportation explained that the Green Bay Wind turbine farm “would significantly impair or degrade the capability of the Department of Defense to conduct research, development, testing and evaluation, and operations or to maintain military readiness.”

 

 

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