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Just as the Trump administration abruptly halted five offshore wind projects in December, a new study aims to quantify the impacts the controversial industry may have on commercial scallop fishers.
The study, published mid-December, found that while offshore wind may not change scallop fishing much — causing only an estimated 4% increase in travel time — even that amount of change could still leave a major impact on the highly lucrative and sensitive industry.
“It’s kind of like death by a thousand cuts,” said Sarah Borsetti, paper author and fisheries researcher at Rutgers University’s Haskin Shellfish Research Laboratory. “With all of the other things facing the industry, this is another thorn in the side.”
Using a model that previously predicted changes in the surfclam industry, Borsetti and her team sought to simulate fishermen’s real behavior in and around offshore development sites. To make her model as accurate as possible, her team interviewed commercial scallopers across the Eastern Seaboard — but primarily in the industry hub of New Bedford.
The simulations found a less than 4% increase in fishers’ travel time, and time spent fishing — a less than 1% increase for areas outside of the offshore wind farm’s footprints, and a 3% increase for areas within the wind farm’s leases. Unlike in other countries, U.S. fishers aren’t banned from fishing within offshore wind lease areas, but they still tend to avoid the turbines due to safety concerns. Perhaps as a result of that behavior, Borsetti said, the model also found a 4% to 9% decrease in the number of scallops outside of offshore wind lease areas.
Compared to other fisheries, offshore wind leases overlap very little with scallop fishing access areas, making their overall impact on fishers’ behavior minimal, Borsetti said. However, she acknowledged that in a fishery grossing approximately $500 million annually, these slight changes could amount to millions in lost revenue.
Some of these losses are already being directly accounted for. In Massachusetts, the offshore wind project Vineyard Wind agreed to set aside $19 million to compensate fishermen adversely affected by the company’s operations. Similarly, Rhode-Island-based South Fork Wind allows Massachusetts and Rhode Island fishermen to file claims with the company for any losses related to the project, but only Rhode Island fishermen can appeal the company’s decision.
Scallopers based out of southern ports could face the most change, since many already travel further north, as their own scallop beds deplete due to climate change. Increasingly, Borsetti has heard of southern scallop fishers docking in New Bedford to cut down on some of the expensive travel time.
“The clock starts a lot sooner for them than maybe some of the boats out of New Bedford,” Borsetti said.
Borsetti’s results mirror those found by the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Management (BOEM) in a study published November 2024, which determined that the current configuration of offshore wind lease sites would do minimal damage to commercial scallopers.
Her findings also come as the Trump administration seeks to hinder both offshore wind development and research into the industry’s impacts. Earlier in 2025, both the U.S. Department of Energy and BOEM terminated grants that would have funded a five-year study on offshore wind’s economic impacts as well as aerial surveys of the North Atlantic right whale population near offshore wind lease sites.
At the same time, the administration has looked to restore America’s seafood competitiveness, largely by rolling back marine mammal protections and other environmental regulations.
When Borsetti and paper co-author David Rudders, the associate director of the Marine Advisory Program at the William & Mary Virginia Institute of Marine Science, first interviewed scallop fishers for this study in 2021, conversations around offshore wind development were just beginning, Borsetti said.
“We were just showing them at that time what the scale of the offshore wind leases would look like,” Borsetti said. “A lot of the industry at that point were like, ‘We haven’t seen these maps.’ They were familiar with a few projects here and there.”
Since then, more scallop fishermen have mobilized to preserve their industry against outside forces. Beyond offshore wind, that also includes examining controversial permitting measures that could cut costs while further consolidating commercial scallop fishing into the hands of a few.
Even as more research like Borsetti’s is published, fishermen remain wary of change. New England Fisheries Management Council member Eric Hansen said future research must take into account how scallop fisheries migrate over time, making it difficult to predict where future top fishing locations may be in the long run.
“Right now, the siting of most wind farms avoids the highest concentrations of historic scallops, but that doesn’t mean that that will be true in the future,” Hansen said.
Plus, fishermen have also taken issue with how offshore wind developers handle compensation claims. Rather than issue direct compensation, Hansen said developers should offer general compensation to fishermen to account for the difficult-to-quantify trickle-down effects offshore wind may have on the industry.
Tony Alvernaz, a part-owner of six scallopers, said he’s already had a claim denied because he reported losses in an area he has historically fished — just not in the past five years. His experience, hearing from captains that they avoided a historic fishing ground because it fell within an offshore wind lease area, mirrors the pattern found in Borsetti’s model.
“They’d say, ‘It’s chaotic out there. I’m not fishing over there,’” Alvernaz said. “If I had a captain with some actual cojones I could have gotten right up next to it, but instead, we burned more fuel and lost more money because we had to cover more ground to get our quota.”
In the future, Borsetti hopes to work with captains once again to determine the exact dollar amounts fishers could be losing due to offshore wind development and how potential policy changes could mitigate those losses. Her model can also be used to assess a number of environmental scenarios, including climate change’s impact on scallop fisheries.
“When this was first funded, there was a lot of interest in this work,” Borsetti said. “That has kind of fallen off a little bit.”
Email Brooke Kushwaha at bkushwaha@newbedfordlight.org.
