What Will 357 Wind Turbines Operating off the New Jersey Coast Sound Like?
And just what kind of noise do sonar and pile-driving generate underwater? One independent expert investigated; you can listen to his actual findings below.
“Boots in the dryer.”
That’s how Robert Rand, an acoustics expert based in Brunswick, Maine, describes what the operational noise of the two offshore wind turbine projects planned by Atlantic Shores down the Jersey coast will sound like within four miles of the shoreline.
“If Atlantic Shores north and south are built – that’s 357 turbines. My estimate based on working in acoustics for four decades is that it will be a rumbling, thumping, low-frequency noise coming from the ocean, especially during the night,” Rand said.
“That’s with new, fresh blades,” he added. “When the blades are no longer smooth, that creates a lot more noise.”
Rand isn’t the only one speaking out about the constant, unrelenting noise an array of giant offshore turbines will produce.
On Sept. 13, 2024, the environmental group Save LBI filed a lawsuit in the Superior Court of New Jersey opposing the construction and operation of the Atlantic Shores South project, which it claims will violate local noise ordinances.
“Remarkably, neither Atlantic Shores Offshore Wind nor the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), which approved the project in July, have presented any study of the level and impact of the airborne noise that would be generated during the construction and operation of 200 enormous wind turbines (representing just the south project), each more than three times the height of the Statue of Liberty and some (of them) only 8.7 miles from the beach,” the group said in a September press release.
“The audible noise” from construction, Save LBI wrote in June of 2023 in a response to the Atlantic Shores South draft Environmental Impact Statement, “will be clearly perceived, pulsating, annoying, and sleep-disruptive.”
(Save LBI has also recently notified BOEM and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration [NOAA] of its intent to file additional lawsuits under the Endangered Species Act and the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act).
But perhaps of even more concern than the ongoing disturbance to shore residents is what marine animals have been and continue to be exposed to – the underwater sounds of sonar. If and when the Atlantic Shores projects start construction, that will also include the massive reverberations of pile-driving each of the three million-pound, 300-foot-long steel monopile foundations into the seabed.
Check out four audio files below courtesy of Robert Rand to hear what these activities sound like underwater.
‘Smoke and mirrors’
The bureaucratic momentum for the Atlantic Shores project is provided by a long list of voluminous, highly repetitive regulatory documents, what Rand refers to as “data blizzards,” that fulfill a “permitting methodology.”
The latest such document to come out for Atlantic Shores, a.k.a. EDF Renewables, Inc., and Shell New Energies US LLC, is a “final rule” for an “incidental harassment authorization” published in the Federal Register on Sept. 24, 2024. It gives the company official permission to “harass” marine mammals from Jan. 1, 2025, through Dec. 31, 2029, (the anticipated construction period).
The number of marine mammals Atlantic Shores was given an OK to torment under a level B harassment consent is 17,224, which includes 25 critically endangered North Atlantic right whales. Under the potentially lethal level A “take,” as it’s called, as many as 26 marine mammals – including humpback, minke, and fin whales — can be injured.
(Level A harassment is defined as “any act of pursuit, torment, or annoyance that has the potential to injure a marine mammal” in the wild. Level B includes acts that can potentially “disturb a marine mammal by causing disruption of behavioral patterns, including, but not limited to, migration, breathing, nursing, breeding, feeding, or sheltering.”)
How NOAA Fisheries, which issues these permits, arrives at such precise numbers and specific injuries (or as they like to call them, “annoyances”) from sonar and construction activities involves a lot of statistical wizardry, what Rand calls “smoke and mirrors.”
“They do not know,” he says, “what the noise exposure really is. They are making guesses.”
To corroborate that point, on Nov. 2, 2023, Rand recorded and measured pile-driving noise from the Vineyard Wind project off of Nantucket Island. What he discovered was that despite all the graphs, charts, and experts involved, Vineyard Wind had grossly underestimated both “impulsive and continuous noise levels by current regulatory standards.”
Vineyard Wind obviously realized that as well, needing to increase its visual marine mammal monitoring area by almost double the planned size to four-and-a-half miles.
As Rand noted in his report, “Pile driving noise, even with advanced noise-mitigation techniques, rivals the loudness and frequency range of seismic air gun arrays, with impulsive peak noise levels measured up to 180 dB over 1 kilometer away and RMS (a method of calculating the average loudness of an audio signal) levels over 160 dB at over 3.3 kilometers.”
Pile driving, Rand explained, is all low-frequency noise. “It’s a big booming sound,” he said, in which all the energy is occurring in the range baleen whales (such as the right whale) communicate. This interference could certainly keep a mother’s call from reaching her calf.
As for NOAA Fisheries, it bizarrely states in a recent 604-page biological opinion that for whales who experience temporary hearing loss (which it is expecting), “hearing sensitivity will return to normal within one week of exposure…” As far as permanent hearing loss goes (which NOAA also expects), those whales will not die but continue on with their lives in a deafened state. If those assurances are based on anything more than a wild guess, NOAA did not say.
“Every animal that’s harmed during that operation will never get back to where they were, especially for endangered species,” said Rand.
According to Rand, one of the most important studies to come along showing just how faulty NOAA’s assumptions are on marine mammal hearing was published in 2023 by James J. Finneran in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.
“What Finneran inadvertently discovered,” Rand said, “was that dolphins can lose hearing at levels way below the assumptive threshold for hearing impact that NOAA assumes to be the auditory threshold.” Also revealed in the study is that observing an animal’s behavior to estimate hearing loss (as is frequently done by the “experts”) is meaningless.
Of interest, not so long ago in 2019, New Jersey joined in with eight other coastal states and nine environmental groups in a lawsuit to stop five companies that had been authorized by BOEM to harass thousands of marine mammals by mapping the sea with seismic air guns. While those surveys were for oil and gas exploration, the pile-driving of wind turbine monopiles, as Rand found out, are equivalent in loudness and frequency range to that of seismic air guns.
“The seismic testing activities at issue here,” the lawsuit stated, “will harm the States and their citizens. They will harass marine mammals and other wildlife that commonly move between federal and state waters, including the waters of the States. Further, seismic testing’s negative impact on marine mammals’ health and abundance will make the States less attractive for coastal tourism, will deprive each State of tax revenues associated with coastal tourism, and could create cascading effects on the States’ economically important commercial and recreational fishing industries.”
By 2020 the permits to conduct air gun surveys had expired, and the lawsuit was dismissed. But the states and environmental groups that felt harassment of so many marine mammals “makes a mockery” of the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act have yet to speak up about similar noise-level activities conducted by Big Wind.
The not-so-silent sounds of sonar
Years before any pile driving takes place survey vessels zigzag off the coast mapping the ocean floor with multi-beam echosounders, sparkers, boomers, and CHIRPs. Despite a huge increase in marine mammal strandings linked to the numbers of survey vessels operating (from December 2022 up to mid-April 2023, for example, there were 41 strandings along the New Jersey shore alone) the party line is to consistently say there is “no evidence” linking this to offshore wind development.
Last year, however, Apostolos Gerasoulis, a Rutgers University professor emeritus of computer science, developed software that invalidates that dismissive retort.
Gerasoulis utilized his expertise in data analytics and large-scale information retrieval (having created the search engine Ask.com) to investigate patterns linking survey vessels to whale strandings. The system he created, named Luna after a beloved humpback that washed up on the Long Island shore in 2023, incorporated yearly data covering the numbers of survey vessels in the water, where they went, how many whales died, and even cargo ship traffic.
Using his data analysis, the professor found a direct correlation between whale deaths and the presence of offshore wind survey vessels. “The numbers never lie,” Gerasoulis told a UK paper, “There is a cause. We have shown that the cause for death of the whales is offshore wind.”
Where right whales are concerned Rand says, “they don’t have any more margin for absorbing additional noise burden, and NOAA doesn’t argue with that basic premise, they just don’t address the problem.
“If they did,” he added, “and were truly committed to upholding the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Endangered Species Act, they wouldn’t have issued any of these permits.”
AUDIO FILES (c) 2023 Robert Rand
Sonar sounds at 926 meters (1/2 nautical mile) from the survey vessel. Note: The first 12 seconds will be vessel propulsion and dynamic positioning thruster noise only.
Impulse and swept FM "USBL" sonars at 19.5 to 33 KHz from the vessel Emma McCall at a distance of 926 meters (1/2 nautical mile). These sonars are inaudible to the human ear but are highly audible to MF and HF cetaceans (whales, dolphins, and porpoises) and to "PW" Phocids (seals). This file has been slowed down 20X to bring the pulses and sweep frequencies into the audible human range. These sonars were not documented in the harassment authorizations or survey vessel noise reports.
Pile driving for Vineyard Wind monopile AP40 at a distance of 1056 meters (0.57 nm) recorded Nov. 2, 2023. Listening with headphones is recommended. The continuous whining noises are from propulsion and dynamic positioning thrusters on the piling and support vessels.
Pile driving for Vineyard Wind monopile AP40 at a distance of 7593 meters (4.1 nm) recorded Nov. 2, 2023. Listening with headphones is recommended. The continuous whining noises are from propulsion and dynamic positioning thrusters on the piling and support vessels.
We don't need unreliable off-shore wind that kills eagles, bats, whales and other marine life and has a negligible impact on carbon emissions. What we need, are on-shore, reliable, energy-dense solutions. The way to change the tide is to lobby for ending subsidies and tax breaks for these so-called 'renewables,' since they are not competitive in a truly free market. Meanwhile, the lawsuits from Save LBI and others are a good way to slow these monstrosities down.
Glad to see someone doing the real science for so-called green energy. These turbines are always stuck where there is wind which is where the birds fly. They have been kiling large numbers of birds and now they are killong fish and whales.