Offshore wind energy development presents a huge potential opportunity for coastal and Great Lakes states to meet their clean energy mandates, create jobs, and take a leadership role in the development of new related technologies. In order to effectively take advantage of this potential, public and private sectors must engage in a steep cross-disciplinary learning and innovation curve. Access to reliable, unbiased and timely information and rapid deployment of lessons-learned is essential to build on the momentum created by recent positive signals in the US marketplace.
The Offshore WindHub was designed to facilitate efforts to build the US offshore wind industry by:
- Providing a cross-disciplinary organization of available information state-by-state;
- Developing a system for updating and cataloguing new information as it becomes available and alerting interested parties that updates have been posted; and
- Designing an expandable search platform that will allow queries to be approached in a variety of ways over time and accommodate the addition of new types of information.
Phase I of the Offshore WindHub is focused on the Atlantic Coast. Future phases may expand to other domestic and international regions, and include additional analytical tools, based on user interests and available resources.
We are actively seeking feedback and partnerships to make the Offshore WindHub as responsive as possible to the needs of the offshore wind community-of-interest.
Acknowledgements
This project was made possible through the commitment, teamwork, and iterative learning and knowledge exchange of many organizations and individuals. We gratefully acknowledge the time that many took to share ideas and review drafts of planning documents. We have used many of their good ideas. In particular, we would like to thank our core advisory team: Greg Watson, Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy & Environmental Affairs (EOEEA); Steve Connors, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Brian Smith, National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA); Mary Boatman, US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM); Jacques Roth, New York State Energy Development & Research Agency (NYSERDA); and, Lisa Williams (Placeblogger.com and MIT Media Lab Center).
The website design was developed by Isovera, Inc. Photographs are used with permission of Siemens Wind Power. State, federal, and regional landing page maps were created using Marine Cadastre.Gov.
Christopher Hardy was responsible for project management and coordination of all activities for successful completion of tasks. Fara Courtney provided overall leadership and support.
