Page 34 - BusinessWest April 15, 2024

ENERGY >>
Shore Thing
UMass Amherst to Lead Center of Excellence for Wind-energy Research, Education
BY GEORGE O’BRIEN
[email protected]
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 work- ing 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 Resil- ience 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.
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 — basi- cally 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 work- force diversity, equity, inclusion, and access, with technical special- ization in the reliability and resilience of offshore wind infrastruc- ture, 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 Illi- nois, Maryland, Washington, South Carolina, and Puerto Rico.
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 Ener- gy Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Massachu- setts Clean Energy Center, and Maryland Energy Administration. More than 20 other organizations, including developers, conserva- tion organizations, offshore-wind manufacturers, a grid operator, community representatives, trade associations, and standards orga- nizations, are also anticipated to serve as partners.
As for goals, there are three main ones, about which we’ll get into more detail later:
“We’ve been working on wind energy, and we’ve developed collaborations across the region and around the country.”
34 APRIL 15, 2024
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