Vineyard Wind has announced a new multi-year collaboration with the University of New Hampshire (UNH) to deploy a passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) device to record ambient sound and marine mammal species vocalisations in the OCS-A 501 lease area.
The monitoring device will record underwater sound a minimum of 30 days before the start of offshore construction of the 800MW JV between Avangrid Renewables and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners and will remain active through at least three years of O&M.
Vineyard Wind chief executive Klaus Skoust Moeller said: “As the first commercial scale offshore wind farm in the US, we’ve tried to set a very high bar when it comes to marine mammal and environmental protections.
“Our collaboration with the University of New Hampshire allows us to leverage their significant local expertise and build on existing scientific capacity in New England to support future work in this growing industry.
“The data we collect in this program will allow us to make informed, science-based decisions that will allow responsible wind energy development with minimal impact on the marine environment.”
The University of New Hampshire previously led the Atlantic Deepwater Ecosystem Observatory Network, a baseline acoustic data collection project in the mid- and south-Atlantic Outer Continental Shelf.
UNH’s Center for Acoustics Research and Education director and research professor Jennifer Miksis-Olds said: “Sound is the dominant sensory mode for life underwater, and as the regional oceans become busier, sound from human activity has the possibility of masking biologically important sounds which could potentially alter the local ocean soundscape and impact marine life.
“This exciting collaboration with Vineyard Wind will provide valuable data that could help make a positive difference in effective monitoring and mitigation of marine mammals and be a model for future ocean users to be sound environmental stewards.”
Under the terms of the contract, Vineyard Wind and UNH will partner for a 5-year period that overlaps both the construction and O&M phase of the offshore wind project.
The programme will provide tuition assistance for graduate students in UNH’s College of Engineering and Physical Sciences who will participate in the data collection and analysis.
Students will use the data to determine the species and numbers of marine mammals that may be present in the Vineyard Wind lease area, and the types and the amount of sound that is created by the offshore wind project.
The project recordings will be compared with data that UNH already has in-house from its other scientific endeavors in the Atlantic region.
Vineyard Wind 1 will begin delivering clean energy to Massachusetts in 2023.