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  • 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 educa- tion. 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 rigor- ous 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, nonprof- its, 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 repre- sentatives 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.
“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 Brook- lyn Bridge.
This passion for bridges and design and construc- tion 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 basi- cally ready to go,” he explained. “And we had a con- cept, centered around reliability and resilience, basi- cally ready to go.”
This team will be tasked with unlocking that enor- mous potential for offshore wind that Arwade men- tioned 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 con- structing systems and as the components become commodity items; the cost is higher, but it’s becom-
Sanjay Arwade says offshore wind lags behind the onshore variety, but there is momentum and progress on several fronts.
Staff Photo
“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.”
ing competitive, and the trajectory on cost is good. If the lessons learned from onshore wind apply to off- shore 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 consider- able amount of momentum regarding this brand of clean energy.
“There are numerous projects under construc- tion, others nearing construction phase, and even the hiccups we’ve experienced related to inflation and economic issues ... the industry seems to be over- coming those,” he told BusinessWest, acknowledging that there are concerns from “co-users” of the ocean, including fisheries and environmentalists, and, mean- while, the cost of offshore wind remains high com- pared to the onshore variety and other sources of energy.
Wind in Their Sails
Arwade said his role will be to manage the vari- ous objectives of the ARROW initiative, and there are
several of them, including education, research, and community outreach and engagement related to off- shore 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 pro- fessional 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, Mary- land, Puerto Rico, and at the national labs in Colo- rado, 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 anoth- er 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 track- ing the publications that our faculty and graduate stu- dents 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 bring- ing the offshore-wind industry forward, while also enabling this region, the Commonwealth, and espe- cially its flagship state university to assume leader- ship positions in those efforts.
“Massachusetts has been a leader in offshore wind for a few decades now, both on the indus-
try side and the government and regulatory side,” Arwade said. “Massachusetts has also led on the aca- demic side, through our work and with our partners at UMass Dartmouth and UMass Lowell and North- eastern. But getting this recognition from the Depart- ment 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.” BW
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