BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM
When engineers drove 54 steel cylinders into the sandy seafloor southeast of Long Island to anchor Empire Wind 1’s turbines, the goal was simple: keep 810 megawatts of generating capacity upright in the Atlantic. What happened next was quite unexpected.
Research from Taiwan’s Formosa Wind Farm, where 69 turbines have been running in similar sandy, reef-free water since 2017, offers the closest thing available to a preview of what the New York seabed may become. A study in Frontiers in Marine Science documented 86 reef-associated fish species clustered within 50 meters (about 165 feet) of turbine foundations at Formosa. The surrounding flat sandy areas had none. Over eight years, the seafloor around the steel structures went from bare sand to something resembling a mature reef community.
Why the hard surface matters
Sandy seafloor moves, and the reality is that mussels, barnacles, sponges, and anemones need stable surfaces to attach and build communities; shifting sand doesn’t give them that. Offshore wind foundations do: the steel monopiles themselves, plus the rock armor layered around their bases to prevent erosion.
Once invertebrates get a foothold, the rest tends to follow. The living crust supplies food and shelter for crabs and small fish; larger predators come for those. University of Rhode Island researcher Emmanuel Oyewole has called turbine bases a kind of “mini ecosystem,” though his ongoing Jonah crab research is designed to answer the more difficult question: are these structures actually creating new marine production, or just pulling in animals that were already living somewhere nearby?
The answer changes what the ecological math looks like. A wind farm that generates both power and new habitat is a genuine bonus. One that only concentrates fish from adjacent areas, without adding to total numbers, shifts fishing pressure without increasing what the water holds.
What American research shows so far
Block Island Wind Farm, the first US offshore wind project, had dense blue mussel aggregations around its foundations within four years of construction. Acoustic surveys found high fish density within roughly 400 to 500 feet of the structures, the same pattern Taiwan documented. Real effect, limited range.
Empire Wind 1’s foundations went in between June and fall of 2025, in 75 to 135 feet of water, 15 to 30 miles southeast of Long Island. First power isn’t expected until late 2026. If reef communities develop on Taiwan’s timeline, they’re barely getting started.
Ongoing work at South Fork and Revolution Wind sites pulls Jonah crab trap samples twice a month from commercial lobster boats. Not enough data yet to show results, so all we’re left with are clues, not conclusions.
What the Taiwan findings also show
Species composition around Formosa’s monopiles differed from established artificial reefs in the same region, even when raw species counts looked similar. What formed wasn’t a replica of existing reef communities. Whether it converges toward one over time, or stays its own distinct thing, isn’t yet known.
The turbines’ ecological influence also didn’t radiate far. Effects concentrated within a small radius of each structure.
Whether New York’s foundations follow the same path depends on local specifics: which species are in the area, what the bottom is like, how deep the water runs, how long the structures have been there. Eight years of data from Taiwan is useful context, but it doesn’t necessarily offer us a clear picture of what’s to come.
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