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The electricity potential from offshore wind in the United States is estimated to be more than 2000 gigawatts, roughly twice the nation's current total generation (Musail et al., 2016). Two wind farms are now in operation off the coasts of Rhode Island and Virginia (Figure 1), while 29 offshore wind farms are in varying stages of development in the United States (AWEA, 2020a), with a projected build-out of 30 gigawatts of offshore energy by the year 2030. The adverse effects of offshore wind generation on wildlife are generally acknowledged to be low relative to those of conventional electricity generation technologies (Allison et al., 2019;Gibson et al., 2017). However, adverse impacts are still possible, and understanding the ecological significance of these effects is

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The Endangered Species Act (ESA) mandates protection for listed species, prohibiting intentionally adverse “take” by both public and private activities. The requirements can be perceived as a costly regulatory burden, although minimal understanding of the costs of compliance actions may exacerbate the perceived burden. This has potential consequences for ESA effectiveness and species recovery. We developed a framework to identify when compliance costs could be incurred in a project and then analyzed projected cost data from published Habitat Conservation Plans (HCPs) using this framework. We found that across HCPs, the projected costs reported were incomplete and difficult to interpret with inconsistent reporting across documents. Within the 43 HCPs that had utilizable cost data, the majority of projected costs (77%–97%) were incurred by implementation of ESA compliance activities. Of these, 46% of expected implementation costs were for monitoring efforts for project‐scale HCPs, while 81% of implementation costs for large‐scale projects were for compensatory mitigation actions. Our results provide a first attempt at analyzing the cost of ESA compliance actions using HCPs. However, we found that costs reported in HCPs tended to be opaque and incomplete, underscoring the need for standardization of cost reporting to better support understanding of ESA compliance costs.

The development and expansion of wind energy is considered a key threat to bat populations in North America and globally. Several approaches to mitigating the impacts of wind energy development on bat populations have been developed, including curtailing wind turbine operation at night during lower wind speeds when bats are thought to be more active. Blanket curtailment approaches have shown substantial promise in reducing bat fatalities at wind energy facilities, but they also reduce the amount of energy extracted from the wind by turbines. A related approach, referred to as smart curtailment, uses bat activity and other variables to predict when bats will be at the greatest risk at a given wind facility. In some contexts, a smart curtailment approach might reduce bat fatalities while also reducing energy loss relative to blanket curtailment. However, it has not been clear how to compare blanket curtailment and smart curtailment approaches in terms of annual energy production at wind facilities. Here, we describe a new approach to simulating the influence of blanket and smart curtailment approaches on energy production at wind energy facilities, and demonstrate the approach using 6 wind energy development areas in the Canadian province of Alberta. We show how stakeholders involved can explore the potential influences of various kinds of bat activity on energy production. We present the results of our Alberta analysis and conclude with some caveats and recommendations for future work on simulating the influences of bat curtailment on energy production at wind energy facilities.