Is offshore wind killing whales?

Since the question of whether offshore wind turbines harm marine life such as whales has gotten a lot of attention recently, our senior director of the Campaign for 100% Renewable Energy teamed up with our Protect Our Oceans Campaign director to help separate fact from fiction. 

As of 2024, no U.S. whale death has been linked to offshore wind operations.

How does offshore wind impact whales?

The reality is, there aren’t a lot of wind turbines off America’s shores as of 2024, and most of the planned wind projects are still in early phases of development. 

All industrial-scale ocean activity has some impact on the animals that live there. Installing wind turbines in the ocean will disturb whales in the short term because of the noise and increased vessel traffic associated with fixing supports to the ocean floor and getting the turbines in place. That’s why federal agencies have been working with wind companies to develop strategies to mitigate these short term risks, including creating installation schedules timed to avoid whale migrations, enforcing installation stops if observers spot a whale nearby, and implementing new, innovative mitigation measures to reduce the impact of noise pollution created by installations. 

Once the short term disruption of installing offshore wind turbines is over and the turbines are in place, we don’t know that wind will have many or any impacts on the lives of whales. 

What is putting whales at risk?

The biggest threats facing whales include entanglements in fishing gear and being struck by boats and plastic pollution. Other risks include a rise in ocean noise and climate change, which threatens to alter whales’ habitat and food sources.

For the Atlantic’s most at-risk whale, the numbers on this are crystal clear: of the 30 known North Atlantic right whales deaths examined by scientists between 2017-2024, 25 whales died from vessel strikes or entanglement. Getting this highly endangered species’ population back on track means tackling those two threats directly.

As we look to the future, of course, we should make sure that developing industries taking up space in our ocean, such as the offshore wind industry, are doing so far more responsibly than in the past. And we should be monitoring offshore wind installations and other new ocean uses for their impacts on whales and all of our other ocean life. 

But if our concern is saving right whales and stopping the deaths of other large whales, we need to start with the activities happening in our ocean today. We need lobster and crab fishers to adopt new, whale-saving technology. We need more boats to slow down when right whales are in town. We need to curb the flow of plastics into our oceans. And, we need to change our energy system to reduce our output of climate-changing greenhouse gasses, so that our ocean ecosystems can avoid more of the worst consequences of global warming.

We can save right whales, and all our whales.

If you want to make sure that future generations can marvel at right whales off our coast, there are steps you can take right now. You can call on your Members of Congress to support more funding for whale-safe, ropeless fishing gear pilot programs. You can also take action to put wildlife over waste by voicing your support for an end to single-use plastics.