As the fishing boat motors gently out of Newlyn’s harbour, the sky is clear and the sea is millpond-flat. Below the surface, the clear waters are teeming with life; Newlyn, in south-west Cornwall, is home to one of Britain’s largest trawler fleets, with more than 100 boats regularly landing catches. However, miles out to sea, a storm is brewing.
The boats’ fishing ground could end up being squeezed by floating windfarms planned for the Celtic Sea, an area of the Atlantic bordered by Cornwall, south-west Wales, southern Ireland and the north-western edge of France. In July, the crown estate – the Queen’s property manager and owner of the seabed around England, Wales and Northern Ireland – announced that five sites in the Celtic Sea could host offshore installations that could deliver four gigawatts of wind energy by 2035. Up to 300 turbines would power nearly 4m homes, and generate income for the crown and the Treasury.
An auction last year of other plots off England and Wales saw unprecedented interest from energy companies, driving bids to record levels, with the crown estate set to receive up to £9bn over the next decade. Those zones are expected to house six new windfarms, generating enough electricity for 7m homes, and could be an essential step in the drive to decarbonise the UK’s power system.
The plans are the talk of the port in Newlyn, and are being met with trepidation in Britain’s shrinking domestic fishing industry.
In the chilly halls of the town’s seafood market, fishers such as Chris Nowell, bearing a box of line-caught sea bass and pollock, arrive throughout the day with their silvery catch, which is assessed, weighed and packed in ice. More than 50 species pass through the market, from megrim (also known as “Cornish sole”) and red gurnard to mackerel and ray. Worth about £20m a year, they are destined for local dining tables and restaurants in the UK and abroad.
The man responsible for running the market is Paul Trebilcock, managing director of W Stevenson & Sons, whose fleet has fished out of Newlyn for over 100 years. His main feeling about the windfarm proposals is “apprehension”, he says from his market office.
In recent decades, fishers have seen no-go zones proliferate, including marine protected areas, power cabling sites, and oil and gas installations. At a time when many remain bitter about the absence of the Brexit benefits they were promised, fishers say they are facing a “spatial squeeze”, with more boats competing to fish in ever-smaller areas.
“When you layer these things on top of each other, it gets quite scary,” Trebilcock says. “If you’re trying to harvest fish in the sea and the areas you go to are taken away one by one, it feels like death by a thousand cuts.”
Although Trebilcock and other Newlyn fishers are at pains to point out that they are not opposed to offshore wind, they feel “bottom of the list” in decisions over the use of Britain’s waters.
Stevenson employs about 40 people on shore at Newlyn, and a further 50 at sea, but warnings about the impact of offshore wind are stark.
“Some of the search areas being looked at are enough for us to consider the viability of some boats,” Trebilcock says. “The north coast of Cornwall is a valuable Dover sole fishery and some areas being looked at would effectively take that out of the equation. The consequence could be catastrophic for our fleet.”
Trebilcock’s fears are shared by James Chown, skipper and owner of the 18.5-metre Ajax. He is checking his nets and filling up with fuel and ice before heading back out to sea.
Ajax is one of Newlyn’s bigger boats, and Chown – “Chunky” as the 50-year-old is known – and his five-strong crew usually spend every other week at sea, hunting hake and pollock. As some trips take him more than 50 miles from shore, he is likely to be among those hit hardest by the proposed windfarm sites.
Because they will be in deep water, the Celtic Sea turbines will sit on floating concrete and steel platforms anchored by cables to the seabed.
“The fishing industry normally adapts to whatever it has to,” Chown says – tattoos depicting a sailing ship, the coat of arms of Padstow, his home town, and Cornish and English flags visible below his T-shirt sleeves. “But my concern is that you can only adapt if you’ve got room to adapt.”
A further squeeze on fishing grounds will result in more displacement, crews say, with boats forced into areas regularly fished by others, be they British crews or boats from France, Belgium and Spain.
“We are certainly not anti-renewables,” says Chris Ranford, chief executive of the Cornish Fish Producers Organisation, which represents boat owners. They simply want recognition for their centuries-old role in feeding the UK, plus a say in where offshore wind is located.
“We understand the priority,” Ranford added. “What we are asking for is simply a coexistence strategy, where you recognise food security as much as energy security.”
Cornwall’s fishing crews are disgruntled at what they see as a lack of early involvement in the crown estate’s process of identifying areas where floating wind could be located.
“We only found out about this in mid-July along with the rest of the public,” Ranford says. “We knew it was going to happen, but we didn’t have any idea where the sites were going to be.”
Development may not stop there: the crown estate says its research shows the Celtic Sea has potential for up to 20GW of additional offshore wind capacity by 2045.
Fishing organisations complain that fishing is not regarded as a “hard constraint” when working out where to locate windfarms. The crown estate disputes this, saying it is committed to working with stakeholders, including the fishing industry, in developing its proposals. It said it had given fisheries data “the highest possible weighting” when identifying “areas of search” in the Celtic Sea, to avoid heavily fished grounds.
Photograph: Adrian Sherratt/The Guardian
Huub den Rooijen, managing director for marine at the crown estate, says: “We fully recognise the importance and value of the fishing sector in the Celtic Sea, and have engaged throughout with key bodies such as the National Federation of Fishermen’s Organisations and the Welsh Fishermen’s Association.” But the estate has to “balance competing needs for seabed space”, he says, adding: “We will continue to engage with the fishing sector to gain a further understanding of their activity.”
Domestic fishing represents less than 1% of the UK’s national economic output, but it is part of the lifeblood of small coastal communities from Cornwall to northern Scotland. About 24,000 people work in fishing and processing, contributing £1.4bn a year to the economy, according to the National Federation of Fishermen’s Organisations.
At the harbour, Will Treneer is unloading a catch of deep blue lobsters, their claws bound by rubber bands. Born and bred in Newlyn, the 33-year-old followed his father and uncle into fishing in his teens. His own five-year-old son asks each morning how the catch went overnight.
“Offshore wind is coming, whether we like it or not, and we should probably embrace it,” Treneer says. “But the fishing industry is going to look a lot different.”
