Support for New York State Review of Mitigation Plans in Offshore Wind Proposals

To help meet New York’s climate and renewable energy goals, the New York State Research and Development Authority (responsible for advancing development of renewable energy sources in the state) periodically issues competitive solicitations for contracts to procure offshore wind renewable energy certificates. NYSERDA’s first such solicitation required each developer to submit a fisheries mitigation plan and an environmental mitigation plan as part of their proposal. Upon reviewing the proposals submitted, the NYSERDA technical working groups evaluating the proposals found that the proposed plans had widely varying levels of detail and information, which made it impossible for these groups to compare proposals during the review process. To move forward, NYSERDA urgently needed support to generate comparable and standardized mitigation plans with a comparable level of detail in information provided. NYSERDA selected ERG to provide this support.

On a quick turnaround basis, ERG’s team conduct a detailed review of the environmental and fisheries mitigations plans in all three proposals and developed a crosswalk that documented common elements in all plans, elements addressed in some plans but not others, and discrepancies in the level of detail for these elements. To fill these gaps and resolve discrepancies, our team then worked with NYSERDA to contact proposers to request additional information. We reviewed the revised plans to ensure that the comments had been addressed and the requested additional information had been provided. NYSERDA’s technical working groups then used the revised and standardized mitigations plans to review and award proposals. For future solicitations, ERG developed annotated plan outlines for both mitigation plans describing key elements bidders should include in mitigation plans submitted in future proposals.