A just-initiated lawsuit by Rhode Island-based Green Oceans, along with individual plaintiffs, two Indian Tribes, and the New England Fishermen’s Stewardship Association out of Maine, is challenging the approval of Orsted’s Sunrise Wind and seeking to prevent its impending operation.

Filed at the end of March in the D.C. Federal District Court, the blistering complaint outlines how the main federal agency in charge, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), went wrong when evaluating the offshore-wind area, subsequently approving the final Record of Decision and the Construction and Operations Plans, which allowed the project to go forward.

One aspect of Sunrise Wind, covered in the complaint but otherwise given little attention, is the granting by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency of a permit allowing it to take in raw seawater, heat it up, contaminate it, and discharge it back to the tune of eight million gallons a day into – as the permit says -- “receiving water named Atlantic Ocean.”

Before that release happens, however, untold numbers of zooplankton and fish larvae will be killed by getting sucked into Sunrise Wind’s massive offshore cooling system.

“A straw man”

Sunrise Wind, currently under construction in federal waters south of Martha’s Vineyard. Mass., and east of Montauk, N.Y., was awarded its final federal okay to start building and ultimately go online in 2024. Prior to that, the project went through the required hoops and mountains of paperwork supposedly designed to lay out the environmental risks of constructing and operating the project.

One of those robust documents, the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), which cost BOEM over $3 million to produce, contains a section that’s referred to as “the heart of the EIS”, intended to measure what the environmental costs might be if Sunrise Wind goes forward, versus doing nothing.

That “no-action” alternative, the lawsuit states, instead of being a “clean comparative baseline,” is “constructed to absorb the environmental damage of virtually every ongoing and anticipated human activity in the region,” including “all current and foreseeable future offshore wind projects, undersea infrastructure, tidal energy development, marine mineral extraction, military operations, marine transportation, fisheries activity, oil and gas operations, onshore development, and the projected effects of global climate change.”

This ‘do-nothing’ alternative comprises a “straw man,” the complaint maintains, “pre-loaded with nearly as much anticipated environmental damage as the proposed action itself…”

And even worse, the lawsuit contends, that methodology “has been applied to every offshore wind project reviewed on the Atlantic Outer Continental Shelf,” each one “appearing to cause only marginal additional harm.”

An EIS that “…deflects documented environmental harms onto climate change does not take a hard look” at the issue involved. Instead, it merely “performs the appearance of one.”

This is the mechanism that allowed BOEM to proclaim that practically every single “resource” Sunrise Wind (and other offshore wind projects) will touch, from bats and birds to fish habitats and marine mammals, will have virtually the same impact as “no action” -- doing nothing.

“Monoliths of doom”

Being built smack within a NOAA Fisheries-designated “Habitat Area of Particular Concern,” Sunrise Wind will be operating an offshore substation utilizing what’s called “open-loop” cooling. This is an especially destructive method also used by older coal, gas, and nuclear facilities that have ready access to large bodies of water.

Up to eight million gallons of seawater each day will be used to cool down the hot, volatile, potentially explosive process of converting the AC power that will be generated by Sunrise Wind’s 84 turbines and turn it into DC power so it will travel more efficiently through 108 miles of seafloor-entrenched cables to reach land.

Over ten years ago, the environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council issued a brief on the topic of power plant cooling, saying that “Closed cycle cooling (the opposite method, where the water is cooled and reused instead of discharged) has become the technology of choice for most power plants since the early 1970s.”

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, however, when issuing Sunrise Wind’s permit under the federal Clean Water Act, allowing it to discharge chlorine-treated and heated water into the Atlantic, bypassed the EPA’s requirement dictating the use of the “Best Technology Available.”

Instead, the Green Oceans lawsuit states the EPA used “Best Professional Judgement,” a wrong interpretation of the law, but one that BOEM accepted without question.

According to Sunrise Wind’s own analysis, which is stated in the complaint, its open-loop cooling system will kill nearly 3 million fish larvae annually, including those of Atlantic cod, and over eight billion zooplankton. That includes over a billion of a specific type – Calanus finmarchicus, the primary diet of the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale.

As outlined in the Sunrise Wind EIS, seawater is sucked through three individual vertical pipes attached to a leg of the steel foundation jacket 30 feet above the seafloor. “The three seawater lift pumps would pump water into a single manifold that leads into a coarse filtering element designed to remove suspended particles larger than 500 microns.”

In other words, the Sunrise Wind cooling water intake system will be impinging (trapping against the intake screen) and entraining (capturing anything not trapped by the filter that gets drawn into the system) billions of aquatic organisms each year, which are frequently referred to by marine biologists as the “engine of the entire marine ecosystem.”

And despite Sunrise Wind being a new, out-of-the-box facility, its use of open-loop cooling brings its technology back to that of old coal and nuclear plants. A 15-year-old analysis by the Department of Energy found that 53 percent of electric power plants were using closed-loop cooling methods— and that was back in 2011!

The fight to upgrade these killer cooling systems used in older facilities has been ongoing for decades, most notably with New Jersey’s Salem nuclear power plant on Delaware Bay, the two units of which went online in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

The Salem facility sucks three billion gallons of water a day from the Delaware River, uses it, and discharges the heated and contaminated water back into the river. In doing so, billions of fish, eggs, and larvae are entrained and impinged every year.

Maya van Rossum, Attorney and Executive Director of the Delaware Riverkeeper Network, has been leading the fight to have the Salem facility upgrade its cooling system for decades. Despite a 1990 N.J. Department of Environmental Protection draft permit requiring the facility to retrofit the plant with a closed-cycle system, to this day, that has not happened.

Van Rossum calls such systems “monoliths of doom,” and “the single largest predators of our nation’s waters…” in a 1995 article in the Vermont Law Review.

And, regardless of 40 years of environmentalists battling these old open-loop systems, a curious mention in the 2023 Sunrise Wind EIS notes that the project will “upgrade…to a closed-cycle cooling system if the technology becomes available during project operations…”*

Don’t hold your breath.

*(See page 3-189, table 3.10-5, mitigation measures of the Sunrise Wind EIS).