In N.J., offshore wind projects get a boost

About 417 square miles of prime Continental Shelf real estate off New Jersey this week got another boost forward for wind development.

Secretaries Steven Chu of the Department of Energy and Ken Salazar of the Department of the Interior announced that the area was one of several "high-priority" areas in the Mid-Atlantic that would get expedited review, knocking perhaps two years off a permission process that would have taken seven to nine years.

At least four projects are in the works for the ocean bed roughly off Atlantic City. Under previous rules, the developers would have had to do one environmental impact study before getting a lease, then another before being allowed to actually build something. Each study could take as long as two years, experts have estimated.

Now, the Interior Department's Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement will prepare broad regional environmental assessments. If these find no significant obstacles to moving forward, the projects could then be awarded leases. After that, the project developers would proceed with the more-detailed environmental evaluations for particular sites.

With the expedited review, leases could be offered by the end of this year or early 2012, Salazar said.

Environmental advocacy groups were quick with praise. "Before now it was easier for oil rigs to be built off our coast than windmills," said the New Jersey Sierra Club's Jeff Tittel. "This is a real victory for offshore wind."

Chu also announced $50.5 million in grant money over five years for projects that would develop better offshore wind technology and remove "barriers."

- Sandy Bauers

Not long ago, researchers using an exquisite electronic device weighing less than two squares of toilet paper got a jaw-dropping view of one of the longest migrations on the planet. They had affixed the thing to the leg of a red knot, a tiny shorebird that migrates through Delaware Bay.

It traveled 16,600 miles from the tip of South America to the Arctic and back. It dodged storms and made a six-day marathon flight of 5,000 miles across open ocean.

Now, another of these amazing gizmos - a geolocator - has verified the round-trip migration of a ruddy turnstone at some 16,777 miles. Which tops the red knot.

Ruddy turnstones are small birds weighing less than 100 grams.

Clive Minton, a researcher with the Victorian Wader Study Group, Australia, who also has worked with local scientists on the red knot, said that the data retrieved so far showed that the birds start their northward migration with an initial nonstop flight of about 4,700 miles in six days to Taiwan or adjacent regions.

There they refuel on the tidal flats before moving north to the Yellow Sea and northern China. They then make a flight of more than 3,000 miles to the breeding grounds in northern Siberia, arriving in the first week of June, he said.

- Sandy Bauers