Costa Mar's captains weigh the offshore wind future

Captain Raúl Moreno was sorting nets at dawn on the Puerto Azul waterfront when the Federal Civic Affairs Minister's office released its latest energy white paper. He didn't read it himself—he doesn't read policy documents—but one of the younger crew members showed him a summary on a phone. The paper proposed a significant expansion of offshore wind capacity in Costa Mar's exclusive economic zone, with the first turbine array potentially sited within fifteen kilometres of the region's primary fishing grounds.

Moreno has worked these waters for thirty-two years, first as crew and for the last eighteen as captain of the Esperanza, a thirty-eight-foot seiner that works the shelf between Puerto Azul and the northern cays. He knows the tidal patterns, the seasonal fish movements, and the exact coordinates where the reef monitoring network has placed its sensor arrays. He also knows that diesel fuel has climbed from 2.10 florins per litre in January to 2.87 florins this month—a 37 percent rise that has compressed his margins to a point where some weeks the fuel cost exceeds the catch value.

The offshore wind proposal sits in the Federal Assembly's Energy Committee, where it has been since September. The stated goal is to reduce Costa Mar's reliance on hydroelectric export revenue and create a second renewable pillar for the federal grid. But for Moreno and the other captains in the small-boat fishing cooperative, the proposal raises a question that nobody in Meridian seems to be asking: what happens to the boats when the turbines go in?