Nantucket group petitions Supreme Court to review offshore wind development challenge

Nantucket residents have filed a petition asking the Supreme Court to hear its appeal of a lower court decision allowing the feds to rush its approval of offshore wind projects without considering impacts to the ocean ecosystem.

The petition from ACK For Whales, a nonpartisan community group, comes months after they saw their island become the epicenter of the offshore wind debate in the fallout of a Vineyard Wind turbine blade failure.

Nantucket continues to grapple with the effects of the July breakage.

A federal appeals judge in April rejected the group’s arguments that the federal agencies that permitted the 62-turbine, 806-megawatt wind farm violated the Endangered Species Act, with construction threatening to “decimate” the endangered North Atlantic right whale.

ACK For Whales’ petition, filed Monday, highlights how the group believes the decision from the U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals was wrong, as it allowed the National Marine Fisheries Services to ignore the Endangered Species Act in its ruling.

The petition points to a specific requirement in the ESA that “the best available scientific and commercial data available” must be used in issuing determinations.

“The disastrous blade catastrophe in July—not to mention the evidence of grave harm to an endangered species—makes clear the cost of the government’s decision to ignore its own laws,” ACK For Whales’ President Vallorie Oliver said in a statement.

“The government tried to speed its pet political projects forward and gamed its ‘analysis’ so it could ignore the lethal threats to right whales,” she added.

In a similar lawsuit, an attorney representing the Department of the Interior, the National Marine Fisheries Service, and other federal agencies, suggested over the summer that fishermen and residents have no interest in protecting right whales.

The First Circuit Court of Appeals based its upholding of a district court’s dismissal of ACK For Whales’ suit on how it “had to defer to the federal agencies’ interpretation of the ESA’s requirements.

ACK For Whales said its case is the first offshore wind argument to reach the Supreme Court.

The group’s attorney Nancie Marzulla highlighted the Supreme Court’s Loper Bright decision from the summer, which “expands the judiciary’s power to review and reject interpretations of statutes adopted by federal administrative agencies.”

“The 1st Circuit erroneously rejected ACK For Whales’ arguments,” Marzulla said in a statement. “The panel sidestepped the ESA requirements by deferring to the agencies. In its Loper Bright decision, the Supreme Court said courts and judges decide legal interpretations, not marine biologists.”

ACK For Whales called for a moratorium on all offshore wind development in August.

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