Three local research projects have lost millions of dollars in federal funding as part of the Energy Department grant cancellations the Trump administration announced Thursday.
All of them deal with renewable energy — either offshore wind or wave energy.
The organizations leading the research are Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the East Falmouth-based Coonamessett Farm Foundation, and Littoral Power Systems of New Bedford.
Liese Siemann, a senior research biologist leading the study for the Coonamessett Farm Foundation, had already started work. The project aims to evaluate the consequences of offshore wind development for commercial fish species and seafloor habitat.
“From a scientific perspective, I think this country kind of charged into developing all of these wind farms,” she told CAI in an interview Monday. “And the truth is, we really don't know what the impact of these wind farms is going to be on the marine environment. So this was an important project for starting to understand that.”
She said she sees some irony in the Trump administration cutting a project like hers, when many supporters of the administration believe in taking a more critical look at the effects of wind turbines.
“Yeah, absolutely,” she said. “That's something I've been thinking a lot about. Knowledge is critical for understanding what impact these wind farms have.”
The foundation had been awarded $3.5 million from the Energy Department and received 20 percent of the money to cover the initial preparation tasks. The researchers had already written the study design, tested a video trawling system, bought and tested ropeless traps, and redesigned a trawl net so it wouldn’t kick up as much sediment.
Cuts across the country risk wasting the public money already spent to get such research started, Congressman Bill Keating said.
“Are we just wasting the investment that occurred before?” he said. “These are the kind of questions that we shouldn't even have to ask, because when an agency makes these kinds of decisions across the whole United States, there should be a reason for it.”
The Department of Energy said the $7.6 billion in canceled grants do not meet the Trump administration’s goals.
In a news release, the department said the projects did not “adequately advance the nation’s energy needs, were not economically viable, and would not provide a positive return on investment of taxpayer dollars.”
But Keating said the reasons are ideological.
“It's nothing to do with anything except their continued ideological attack on science and climate change,” he said Monday.
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution lost funding for research to improve wind forecasting for offshore wind farms. It was funded at $8 million.
Littoral Power Systems lost money that would have been used to create a wave-energy system controlled using artificial intelligence. The project had been awarded just under $4 million.
The Coonamessett Farm Foundation planned to evaluate the presence of fish and the state of their habitat at wind farms before, during, and after construction.
The project was designed to use three different tools: a habitat-mapping camera, known as HABCAM, which gets towed along the bottom of the ocean and takes multiple photos per second; a video trawl system from the School for Marine Science and Technology at UMass Dartmouth; and baited underwater video cameras.
The foundation received a letter from the Energy Department saying the research does not fit the department’s priorities for “affordable, reliable, and abundant energy.”
