The South Coast Wind project must go through a rigorous permitting and review process that involves local, state, and federal agencies and addresses environmental, navigational, aeronautical, historical, and archeological concerns. Extensive studies must be done in each of these areas prior to permitting.
To initiate this process, the Environmental Notification Form (ENF) for South Coast Wind was filed with the Massachusetts Environmental Policy Act (MEPA) Office in May 2006 to kick off the environmental permitting process.
The MEPA Office facilitates interagency review of a project so that all permitting agencies can collectively work to protect the environment. After the South Coast Wind ENF was filed, the MEPA Office collected comments from many organizations. In August 2006, then-Secretary of Environmental Affairs Stephen Pritchard issued the ENF Certificate for the South Coast Wind project, which contained recommendations and requirements for the project’s next step in the environmental permitting process: a draft Environmental Impact Review (EIR).
Evaluating the risk to certain rare avian species was a primary concern noted in the ENF for South Coast Wind. Therefore, to-date the project has focused almost exclusively on studying the risk to birds. South Coast Wind has spent over $1,000,000 on two years (four seasons) of research on bird activity in Buzzards Bay.
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