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Shore Thing

 

Sanjay Arwade says UMass Amherst has a long and proud history in the broad realm of wind energy.

It dates back nearly a half-century to professor William Heronemus, who established what is now the oldest wind-energy research and education center in the country.

“He started working on wind energy, and there’s been a string of faculty members over the years, mostly in mechanical engineering, but now some, like me, in civil engineering, who have been working on wind-energy problems,” said Arwade, a professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “We’ve been working on wind energy, and we’ve developed collaborations across the region and around the country.”

This history, and these collaborations, certainly played a role in this tradition reaching a new and intriguing level with the recent announcement that UMass Amherst has been selected by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to establish and lead something called ARROW — the Academic Center for Reliability and Resilience of Offshore Wind, with an emphasis on those two R-words.

This will be a nearly $12 million national center of excellence, said Arwade, one that will accelerate reliable and equitable offshore wind-energy deployment across the country and produce a well-educated domestic offshore wind workforce. 

“We’ve been working on wind energy, and we’ve developed collaborations across the region and around the country.”

Elaborating, Arwade said development of offshore wind has lagged behind its close cousin, the onshore variety, and for various reasons. ARROW has been created to essentially help close that gap.

“Onshore wind energy … that industry is a total success,” he noted. “We produce huge amounts of electricity from wind onshore, mostly up and down the Great Plains and the center of the country. That energy is, in many days, the cheapest electricity in the country.

“Offshore wind is at an earlier stage,” he went on. “There’s a lot of offshore wind in Northern Europe and a little bit here — basically three projects are operating in the United States: Block Island, Vineyard Wind, and one in Virginia. So we’re at an earlier stage, but the potential is huge.”

Harnessing that potential is at the heart of ARROW, which will involve a number of partners — more than 40, in fact — and set several different goals, said Arwade, noting that the center will be a university-led education, research, and outreach program for offshore wind that prioritizes energy equity and principles of workforce diversity, equity, inclusion, and access, with technical specialization in the reliability and resilience of offshore wind infrastructure, transmission, and supply chain.

The various partners include eight universities, three national laboratories, two state-level energy offices, and many industry and stakeholder groups in other areas of Massachusetts as well as Illinois, Maryland, Washington, South Carolina, and Puerto Rico. 

Sanjay Arwade

Sanjay Arwade says offshore wind lags behind the onshore variety, but there is momentum and progress on several fronts.

This consortium includes Clemson University, Morgan State University, Johns Hopkins University, Northeastern University, UMass Dartmouth, UMass Lowell, University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez, Argonne National Laboratory, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, and Maryland Energy Administration. More than 20 other organizations, including developers, conservation organizations, offshore-wind manufacturers, a grid operator, community representatives, trade associations, and standards organizations, are also anticipated to serve as partners. 

As for goals, there are three main ones, about which we’ll get into more detail later: 

• Empowering the next generation of U.S.-based offshore wind professionals. Not only does this include training for offshore wind professionals, but it will also enhance the ability of U.S. institutions to deliver comprehensive offshore wind education and establish global leadership in offshore wind education. The center will advance the education of 1,000 students over the initial five-year life of the center;

• Innovating with impactful research for a reliable and resilient offshore-wind system built on rigorous treatment of uncertainty. Research will focus on infrastructure, atmospheric and ocean conditions, and marine and human ecology; and

• Engaging with communities to get input from the wide diversity of stakeholders who make up the offshore-wind ecosystem, including wind-energy companies, grid operators, manufacturers, nonprofits, insurance companies, and advanced technology developers, in order to arrive at inclusive and just deployment of offshore-wind solutions. 

For this issue and its focus on energy, we talked with Arwade about ARROW and what it means for the university, the region, and ongoing efforts to tap the enormous potential of offshore wind.

 

Bridging the Gap

As he talked with BusinessWest late last month, Arwade was between phone calls from media representatives looking for his take on the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore after it was struck by a massive container ship.

The New York Times found him first, and after his comments to one of its reporters found their way into the Times and then the Boston Globe, other outlets, including the BBC, dialed his number. He told them, and BusinessWest, essentially the same thing — that collapse was imminent after a ship of that size struck a bridge built to the design codes of the 1970s.

“Offshore wind is at an earlier stage. There’s a lot of offshore wind in Northern Europe and a little bit here — basically three projects are operating in the United States: Block Island, Vineyard Wind, and one in Virginia. So we’re at an earlier stage, but the potential is huge.”

“It wasn’t a failure of the structural steel — it was a failure of ship navigation,” he explained. “You could not design that bridge to withstand that impact.”

Arwade worked for some time in Maryland — he was a professor at Johns Hopkins — and he suspects that might be one of the reasons the media sought him out. But he’s also passionate about bridges.

Indeed, the walls of his small office in Marston Hall are covered with photographs and prints of mostly better-known structures, especially the Brooklyn Bridge.

This passion for bridges and design and construction of these structures will now have to share time with ARROW, which he described as both a turning point in UMass Amherst’s long history of windpower research and his own career.

Explaining how it came about, he said the DOE issued a request for proposals for an offshore-wind energy center of excellence roughly a year ago.

“Through our collaborations, we had a team basically ready to go,” he explained. “And we had a concept, centered around reliability and resilience, basically ready to go.”

This team will be tasked with unlocking that enormous potential for offshore wind that Arwade mentioned earlier. He told BusinessWest that, depending on which technical analysis one is looking at, it’s conceivable that half or more of the eastern seaboard can be powered through offshore wind “depending on the scale of development we’re willing to pursue.”

He acknowledged that offshore wind is currently expensive power to produce, but he believes that cost can and will come down over time.

“The trajectory is good,” he said. “As with many engineered systems, the cost goes down over time as we become more expert at designing and constructing systems and as the components become commodity items; the cost is higher, but it’s becoming competitive, and the trajectory on cost is good. If the lessons learned from onshore wind apply to offshore wind, it will quickly, meaning within a decade or two, become highly competitive with other energy sources.”

Elaborating, he said that, while there are some hurdles to overcome, there is, in his view, a considerable amount of momentum regarding this brand of clean energy.

“There are numerous projects under construction, others nearing construction phase, and even the hiccups we’ve experienced related to inflation and economic issues … the industry seems to be overcoming those,” he told BusinessWest, acknowledging that there are concerns from “co-users” of the ocean, including fisheries and environmentalists, and, meanwhile, the cost of offshore wind remains high compared to the onshore variety and other sources of energy.

 

Wind in Their Sails

Arwade said his role will be to manage the various objectives of the ARROW initiative, and there are several of them, including education, research, and community outreach and engagement related to offshore wind.

Projecting out — ARROW still exists only on paper, but is expected to officially commence its work this summer — he expects an educational program to be up and running within a few years, with hundreds of students per year being trained for an industry that will need a workforce.

“These are students who will get bachelor’s degrees, master’s degrees, doctoral degrees, and professional certificates in offshore wind and can go into the field and lead the industry forward in the U.S.,” he said, adding that there are existing programs, but the DOE wanted a comprehensive offshore-wind energy education and research program, and until ARROW, one didn’t exist, except at UMass.

“This one will be bigger, more comprehensive, and bring expertise from all of our partner instititions to bear for our students,” he went on, adding that ARROW will exist in mostly a virtual state, but with initiatives on the Amherst campus, Boston, Maryland, Puerto Rico, and at the national labs in Colorado, Washington State, and Illinois.

Workforce is a key ingredient in the growth and development of the industry, he said, adding that companies looking to hire currently have few places to go find those students. But research will be another key area of focus, and it will cover many areas that are germane to the industry and answer important questions.

“These include how quickly can these structures be installed? What will the cost of construction be? How much energy can be extracted from the wind during operation of the turbines? And how can we ensure that the energy gets distributed to consumers in efficient and equitable ways?” he said.

When asked how those involved in ARROW will measure success, Arwade said there will be several barometers.

“We’re going to count students that we educate; we’re going to track where they go in the industry,” he said. “On our research arm, we’re going to be tracking the publications that our faculty and graduate students make and seeing that they’re being cited and being of use to industry. We’re going to keep track of students that do internships in industry. We’re going to do outreach that brings offshore-wind education and research to a variety of stakeholders, including high-school students, for example. And we’re going to have listened, carefully, to co-users of the coast and the ocean, communities that have been historically disadvantaged and have not seen the benefits of new infrastructure like this.”

Overall, ARROW will play a major role in bringing the offshore-wind industry forward, while also enabling this region, the Commonwealth, and especially its flagship state university to assume leadership positions in those efforts.

“Massachusetts has been a leader in offshore wind for a few decades now, both on the industry side and the government and regulatory side,” Arwade said. “Massachusetts has also led on the academic side, through our work and with our partners at UMass Dartmouth and UMass Lowell and Northeastern. But getting this recognition from the Department of Energy cements Massachusetts nationally as the federally recognized home of offshore-wind research and education in the academic sphere; it’s a huge win for the Commonwealth.

“And I would say the same for UMass Amherst,” he went on. “We’ve been doing wind energy for 50 years, and for us to be trusted by DOE with leadership of this center is a major feather in the cap of UMass Amherst and the UMass system as a whole.”

 

Green Business

A Hot Topic

The Center for EcoTechnology has carved out a significant legacy over the past four-plus decades by promoting green energy, waste reduction, and a host of other environmentally friendly initiatives — partly because it effectively conveys how such practices are good for not just the planet, but the bottom line. Two new solar-access projects — one for homeowners, one for businesses that use a lot of hot water — are no exception.

After decades of connecting businesses and homeowners with renewable-energy solutions, the Center for EcoTechnology in Florence keeps coming up with new ones.

Take, for example, a solar-access program specifically for middle-income homeowners, making it possible for qualifying families to procure solar panels and heat pumps with no upfront costs.

“A lot of middle-income homeowners have not been able to take advantage of owning their own solar arrays,” CET President John Majercak said. “They can make a fixed payment for electricity to somebody who owns the equipment, but there are many more benefits to owning the panels.”

To introduce more households to those benefits, CET has worked with UMassFive College Federal Credit Union on a loan product that not only makes it easier to purchase solar panels — CET actually makes the first six payments on the 10-year loan — but includes a warranty on all equipment and labor for the life of the loan.

“This product makes it possible for a homeowner to own the solar panels and heat pumps,” he explained. “We set it up to make sure what they pay on the loan is less than what they’re paying now for heating and cooling, so they see immediate savings, and after 10 years, they own the system outright, so the heating and cooling, when powered by solar panels, is essentially free after that.”

Then there’s a new program that works with businesses that use a lot of hot water — think breweries, hospitals, laundromats, and many others — and connects them with incentives for solar hot water.

Andrew Mankin (pictured) and Gary Happ recently had a solar hot-water system installed

Andrew Mankin (pictured) and Gary Happ recently had a solar hot-water system installed at their business, Barrington Brewery.

“That’s a program available to any business or farm in the state — including multi-family buildings and nursing homes — that use a lot of hot water year-round. It’s a great technology where we use solar panels to heat water, as opposed to make electricity,” Majercak explained. “For folks who use a lot of hot water in their business, it’s a really economic way to make hot water. It’s technology not a lot of people know about, compared to solar panels that make electricity. So we’re doing a lot of outreach and hand-holding, getting businesses to look at the proposals, the free technical assistance, and the incentives available from the state.”

In both cases, CET partners with state agencies like the Department of Energy Resources (DOER) and the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center (MassCEC) to bring the economic and environmental benefits of solar energy to customers who might not have considered them before.

“If we can help someone’s life be better or their business perform better at the same time we’re helping the environment, it just makes so much sense,” he said. “So we’re always pushing harder to make more of it happen.”

Home and Business

In the case of solar hot water for businesses, CET provides solar hot-water installers to get the project done, information on grants and rebates to help cover costs, and step-by-step guidance through the whole process, Majercak said, adding that other businesses that might benefit include hotels and restaurants, car washes, and community centers and resorts with large indoor swimming pools — any business, really, with year-round use of heated water in large quantities.

A solar hot-water system essentially captures heat from sunlight and circulates the thermal energy to a water tank. Solar hot-water systems reduce reliance on traditional water-heating fuels, such as oil, electricity, or propane, saving consumers money on their energy bills. These systems can provide up to 80% of domestic hot-water needs. Incentives of up to $100,000 are available for qualifying projects, Majercak said.

“The technology has been around for a long time — for decades, really — but it’s improved over the past five to 10 years, and word hasn’t really gotten out how effective it is,” he noted. “We’ve helped a variety of different businesses and been very successful saving them a ton of money — things like a multi-family building that has central hot water, or a farm that has a cheese-making factory on the side. It doesn’t cost anything to have us come out and do an assessment and see if it would be a good match for you.”

John Majercak

John Majercak presents information about CET’s impact during the organization’s annual meeting.

Business owners Majercek has spoken with are often surprised at savings they didn’t know existed, he noted.

“There’s so much information out there, but people don’t always think of their energy costs as something that’s controllable — they say, ‘oh, wow, it costs a lot of money to heat hot water, but what can I do?’ They think of it as the cost of doing business, rather than something they can improve on by using new technology.”

The same is true in the residential market, to some degree, he said, but to those who have signed on, the benefits are evident, including, again, step-by-step guidance through the program from CET, the 10-year warranty on equipment and labor, and a reduction in energy costs right from the start along with increased home value — not to mention a 30% federal tax credit and a 10% tax credit from the Commonwealth for solar installation.

While most homeowners know what solar panels do — convert sunlight into electricity to power a house without any pollution or carbon emissions — heat pumps aren’t as commonly understood, Majercek said.

Rather than burning fossil fuels to produce heating and cooling, heat pumps move heat from one place to another — bringing heat into the home in the winter and removing heat in the summer. Advancements in the technology now allow for excellent performance even on the coldest and hottest days of the year.

“This is a great new program,” he told BusinessWest. “The state specifically targeted middle-income homeowners, helping them get financial help and hands-on assistance from us to take advantage of these two technologies — solar photovoltaic panels and heat pumps, which are becoming much more commonplace.”

Even so, he said, many homeowners have been reluctant to pay the up-front costs for energy-efficient technology, which is why the loan product CET is using — ensuring that their costs don’t rise from what they’re already paying — is so attractive.

Some of those who believe in solar power but fear the initial costs sign onto power-purchase agreements with solar-panel owners, he added, “and that’s OK, but they don’t get the benefits of ownership — the tax credits, the renewable-energy credits. They’re missing out on one of the best parts. This program helps them take advantage of that, and it’s affordable for them right from the start.”

A Green Legacy

Connecting individuals and businesses with green energy solutions is a large part of CET’s mission, but that mission has taken many forms since the organization’s mid-’70s inception.

At first, CET focused on energy conservation, in particular partnering with utility companies on the relatively new concept of ‘energy audits,’ whereby a consultant visits a home or business to talk about ways in which their building or operation could be revamped to save on energy costs.

Other early initiatives included the development of a passive solar greenhouse at Berkshire Botanical Garden and Project SUEDE, a program that taught solar energy, energy-conservation theory, and carpentry to unemployed people, who then installed 31 solar space-heating systems in low-income households.

CET still conducts energy audits, helping homeowners and businesses understand the value of sustainable systems and educating them on the incentives available to make changes. But the organization has become much more, expanding its mission into a host of new opportunities, from composting to food-waste reduction.

Paulina Alenkina, a CET employee

Paulina Alenkina, a CET employee, says she’s glad she took advantage of the solar-access program.

Through a program called RecyclingWorks in Massachusetts, CET offers technical advice and assistance to companies regarding recycling and composting waste. In doing so, it has worked with companies ranging from small shops to large entities like Big Y and Titeflex.

Another success story at CET has been EcoBuilding Bargains, which began life as the ReStore in 2001 before undergoing a move and rebranding seven years ago.

In its first incarnation on Albany Street in Springfield, the ReStore dealt in recycled building materials, with the twin goals of saving builders and do-it-yourselfers money while reducing the burden on landfills. A move to Warwick Street in 2011 involved a $900,000 energy retrofit on the existing building on that site — a good example of CET practicing what it preached.

CET is also making an effort to raise up the next generation of green innovators, through a fellowship program it launched seven years ago. Five fellows per year — recent college graduates from across the U.S. — are chosen to work with CET for one year and receive training in environmental science, energy efficiency, waste reduction, and other aspects of green business. They’ve gone on to work at similarly minded nonprofits, and also corporations looking to go green.

Meanwhile, with utility incentives making energy-efficient technology more affordable for Massachusetts businesses, the Center for EcoTechnology continues to works with Columbia Gas and Berkshire Gas to help companies navigate the incentives and options available.

“The state has goals for how much renewable energy it wants to create, and it wants to address climate change and access all the benefits these technologies and services provide,” Majercek said. “Those goals align closely with our mission. We’re trying to bridge the gap between what we’d like to happen and what’s actually happening in the world.

“If we can come in and provide some education and hand-holding to make it simple for people,” he went on, “the technology can ensure that people get benefits, and the environment gets benefits, too. We’re helping people be more comfortable and save money — and saving the planet. It’s a triple bottom line.”

All Aboard

Businesses can also boost the new solar-access program for middle-income homeowners simply by letting their employees know it exists, he added. “Many businesses have lots of employees that fall into the middle-income bracket and would be able to benefit from the program. We can provide information for companies: newsletters, posters, lunch-and-learn presentations for employees and staff. Businesses can help employees go green and save money; it’s an easy thing to promote, and a win for any employee who would qualify.”

Such initiatives have been a win for CET as well, which not only reached but surpassed its program goals in the most recent three-year period.

“That’s exciting,” he said. “Everyone who works here is extremely motivated by our mission and the impact we can make.”

Joseph Bednar can be reached at [email protected]