DEWEY BEACH, Del.- The topic of offshore wind took center stage at Friday's Dewey Beach town council meeting.
The council decided to hold off on a vote to accept US Wind's offer of joining its' benefit program.
US Wind has offered multiple towns, including Dewey Beach, Rehoboth Beach and Bethany Beach two million dollars over the span of twenty years as the company continues to effort a massive wind farm off the coast of Ocean City.
In return, towns would agree to not obstruct or delay this offshore wind project. Towns would have the ability to drop out of the agreement at any time- but must return any payments it has received and forego any future payments.
"This is part of US Wind's good neighbor philosophy," said Mike Dunmyer, US Wind's Delaware Development Manager. "We're going to be here for a long time. We want to help the towns around us to continue to thrive. The permitting process and decisions about the project are at the federal and state level. There's nothing we're asking the towns for. This is genuinely a good faith offer to try to help the towns out."
Dunmyer continued to say that he believes there are a lot of misconceptions about offshore wind- and that there are a lot of economic benefits to the addition of offshore wind.
"Offshore wind is clean, green energy," he told CoastTV. "There are lots of different types of green energy that are important, but this offshore wind energy is what we can develop here at a utility scale in our area. So it's literally what we can do to help ourselves."
The land is in federal waters and is out of the jurisdictions of the towns. Dewey Beach commissioners noted multiple times that they have no control over the decisions made on these turbines during the meeting.
Neighbors who were opposed to offshore wind made their voices heard during public comment and voiced multiple concerns- from the view, to their impact on the ecosystem.
"We bought out house, right here with views of the ocean, because we love the view of the ocean," said neighbor Chris Hayes. "We don't want these things obstructing the view. We also don't think that it's unnecessary component to the power that's being supplied to us here."
According to Dunmyer, multiple federal agencies are still putting together a final environmental impact study on this project. From there, a decision to approve, deny or to make changes will be made.
It is important to noted that there the visibility of these turbines is not expected to be a huge factor in Dewey Beach. However, there is a second wind farm project being handled by Ørsted- which is expected to be built off the coast of Cape May. According to Commissioner Paul Bauer the Ørsted wind farm is expected to be visible on clear days. But both the Ørsted and US Wind projects are not connected to one another in any way, according to Bauer.Â