Oregon, California universities collaborate to research offshore wind

Floating offshore wind projects are slowly moving forward off the coasts of California and Southern Oregon. The projects could power millions of homes, but they’ve also raised concerns from tribal governments, environmental organizations and the commercial fishing industry.

The Pacific Offshore Wind Consortium aims to address some of those questions. Made up of centers at Oregon State University, Cal Poly Humboldt and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, the consortium will conduct research and provide public information about offshore wind on the West Coast.

Bryson Robertson is the director of the Pacific Marine Energy Center and a professor of civil and construction engineering at OSU. He joins us with more details about the effort.

Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Floating offshore wind projects are slowly moving forward off the coasts of California and Southern Oregon. The projects could power millions of homes, but they have also raised concerns from tribal governments, environmental organizations and the commercial fishing industry. The Pacific Offshore Wind Consortium aims to address some of those concerns. It’s made up of centers at Oregon State University, Cal Poly Humboldt and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. It’ll conduct research and provide public information to help coastal communities and the industry move forward with these projects. Bryson Robertson is one of the Oregon based leaders of this effort. He is the director of the Pacific Marine Energy Center and a professor of civil and construction engineering at Oregon State University. He joins us now with more details about this effort. Welcome to the show.

Bryson Robertson: Welcome, thanks for having me.

Miller: Can you remind us first where we are in this process in Oregon? What has to happen before there are floating turbines generating electricity off of Oregon’s coast?

Robertson: Well, I think the best place to start with that is recognizing that we are at the beginning of probably a decade long process here to decide whether that is even something we should do in Oregon. So, earlier this year, BOEM, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, issued a notice that they have a proposed leasing schedule. So this is to lease federal waters outside, off Oregon’s coast, to allow companies to begin the process of starting to understand whether offshore wind in Oregon or in the federal waters off Oregon makes sense. So they can start to do environmental assessments, they can start to understand the dynamics. So we’re at the beginning of probably a decade-long process to identify and sort of do checks and balances on whether offshore wind makes sense for Oregon.

Miller: What’s the big idea behind this new consortium? What will the combination of these three universities do in terms of this process?

Robertson: Sure. So, the BOEM process again, I want to clarify that the BOEM process is a federal process which the federal government leads and can direct as they do. But what we did as communities deeply engaged and embedded in the regions where offshore wind is either leased or could be leased in the future, we saw there’s a lot of questions in the communities, within our tribal governments, within the stakeholders around this as an opportunity.

And we said, look, we really need a university-based consortium that is focused on the Pacific and the environments and the ecosystems in the Pacific and focused on floating technology. And our goal here is to use experts from all of the schools, all the universities to share resources to co-develop best practices as we move forward on this, and design comprehensive research priorities. So rather than sort of a scattergun approach to researching this, let’s do it in a comprehensive fashion, where we’re all working together, which reflects the dynamic environment of our oceans off the coast, but also understands the diversity of the communities and the tribal and the state governments that play there so we can start to answer some of the questions that really need to be answered along this 10 year pathway.

Miller: What’s going to happen because of this new consortium that wasn’t already happening at these universities? I mean, for example, I know that a lot of ocean energy research in various ways has already been happening at OSU, and I imagine that these other universities as well. So what’s new about this?

Robertson: So the goal here is really, again, it goes back to that sharing resources and understanding the community challenges or the community perspectives. I’m not going to make an argument that what the community needs in San Luis Obispo or in Humboldt is the same as it is in Southern Oregon. We’re all sort of different in that way. So we need to understand what the community is thinking of.

We also need to understand what the ecological impacts or benefits or challenges would be. And again, those become very specific questions along the West Coast. So our mandate or our vision is to bring all these people together so that we can share best practices, so we’re not recreating the wheel. We’re sort of identifying where great research is done internationally and bringing that to application here with the goal being hopefully we can develop the data and the science, the data based sort of discussion pieces, to help provide folks on the West Coast an ability to make educated decisions about the future of offshore wind. And that really needs to be done by universities embedded in those communities.

Miller: Offshore wind is already in place in, many areas outside the U.S. and seems to be working fine. Are there big technical questions that still need to be answered or are the issues at this point more political?

Robertson: They’re both, always. They always are. Yes, but. So the technical questions, yes, there are some technical questions still to be answered. The floating technology is still relatively new. You’ve got sort of less than a dozen commercial projects globally in floating tech. And they’re also built in a way…

Miller: If I may, just to make sure that we all understand. So the floating part is, less common as opposed to what, turbines that are actually cemented into the bottom of the seabed?

Robertson: Exactly. Exactly. I should have clarified that. So, the vast majority, sort of 95% of offshore wind in the world, is what we call bottom fixed. So, a piling is inserted into the sea floor in a static way. The pole goes all the way up. So we have our tower that goes all the way up above the surface and we mount a turbine to the top of it. And that’s great in a lot of parts of the world where the ocean floor is shallow enough, far enough offshore that we can do that.

Now, that is not the case on the West Coast. On the West Coast, the bathymetry, or the ocean topography, is such that it drops off really quickly and we get into deep water very fast. So that technology that they’re deploying off the bulk of the East Coast now, and in the North Sea, is not going to work on the West Coast. It’s a sort of a different technology archetype that needs to float and then be anchored or moored down to the sea floor.

Miller: So, who is leading the charge internationally in terms of the closest analogs to the technology that would theoretically work off the coasts of Oregon and California?

Robertson: Sure. So, Europe is leading the way in this space without a doubt. We’re starting to see small farms of these technologies deployed. Portugal is doing a lot of work in the space. The U.K. is doing a lot of work in the space. The Scandinavians. I think there’s also a significant amount of work coming out of Asia, Korea, countries like that. I don’t have as much of a finger on the pulse in Asia, but definitely see a lot more effort being put into that space.

So, definitely Europe and Asia I think would lead us. And one of the reasons why they are is because it requires a pretty significant amount of port infrastructure to build these. These are not small devices, these are very large devices and you traditionally are building them out of places which had an existing oil and gas industry or significant shipbuilding industry. So Korea, Northern Europe, and maybe the Gulf is where we start to see this technology start to be deployed because there is a really significant port supply chain infrastructure needed to build it.

Miller: One of your goals is to work on workforce education. What kinds of jobs are you envisioning?

Robertson: Oh, there’s going to be a huge amount of jobs required to do this, again, at different stages of the development. So there’s obviously very good trades based jobs that could come from this. Welders, there’s electricians, manufacturing, there’s definitely those sort of those trades based jobs which will be very important.

But we also think that, in the U.S., we need to not just be focused on whether we’re going to deploy this technology off of our coast, but what does the globe need in terms of expertise, knowledge. So we need people to understand new materials that we might put in the blades, we need people to understand, well, how does this change the air sea interface? Does it change the way currents move? Does it change the way fish migrate? How does generating more renewable technology in the ocean change our future potential to decarbonize the planet and mitigate some of the impacts of climate change. So we’re looking at this as a very broad brush approach where we’re taking into account social, technological and environmental impacts, and the sort of political side to this, as a way for us to decarbonize and meet clean energy goals around the world.

Miller: I want to turn to the specific goals of addressing the concerns of various members of the community, because as I understand it, your, your idea is to be a trusted, neutral third party to help address questions or concerns. Are you yourself concerned that some community members may not see you as neutral, given that some of your funding comes from the industry that’s hoping to develop these projects?

Robertson: Sure. Sure. I think that’s a real perspective. And we’re doing our best to try to mitigate those. So any, any participant or any person economically, financially supporting our consortium is making a donation to the consortium. So they are helping say, look, this is important to us, but we get no decision making on what the outcomes are or what the research that is conducted. So it’s purely a donation and then we get to take that funding, we get to tap experts across our three universities on the shoulder and say, look, there is a real community concern around coastal upwelling. Let’s pick one. We have three experts at different schools. Can you spend the next year focused on that and come back to us with an idea of what you think the potential impact would be? So that’s one.

Two, how would we monitor this going forward? So if we do decide as a state to build offshore wind, how would we want to monitor this? What new technology would we need? How do we start to integrate that into our future planning? So, while there are companies doing that in the space and they are, we are, getting some funding, we’re also getting a large amount of funding from foundations, from state governments and hopefully from the federal government as we move forward to have a diversified pool of funding. But no individual entity gets to decide what the research we do is. So that’s sort of on the funding side.

On the community perspective, 100% there are community concerns and that’s a real thing. I think part of that is because there’s been a dearth or a lack of data-based scientific understanding of what the potential is. I think there’s a lot of ifs, buts, maybes, questions, and those are all real. But now we need to start to prioritize those questions and we need to start to go off after the data needed to answer them, so that we can move forward with our decision making based upon science, and based upon the best available data.

Miller: What kind of engagement have you had with sovereign nations, with tribal governments?

Robertson: Sure. So the initial… so the head of the consortium right now is in Cal Poly Humboldt. And within the consortium, we have a number of tribal governments who are on our advisory board. And again, it’s an advisory board. They get to advise ‒ just like industry, tribes, states ‒ they get to advise on the research, but they don’t get to direct the research. So on our advisory board, to help us understand what their major concerns are in that region, where their tribal boundaries lie, how do we start to work together on this? Understand that they are a government and move forward.

In the Oregon context, we still have a lot more work to do in that space. So we’re actively engaging and participating and showing up I think would be the best way to describe our activities in Oregon right now. Is showing up at all the events, listening, trying to provide some data where we have it or just understanding what the concerns are so we can integrate those into our long term research plan for the consortium.

Miller: Bryson, we’ve been talking about offshore wind and this is maybe the third or fourth conversation about this issue we’ve had on Think Out Loud over the last two years or so. But one of your particular research focuses is wave energy. Where does that stand right now? Just briefly, we can talk about this again, but it’s been a little while since we’ve heard about it.

Robertson: Sure. So wave energy is in a really exciting space right now. So I think in terms of infrastructure, the PacWave test facility, which is going to be definitely the U.S.’s leading test facility and one of the leading test facilities in the whole world, will be finalizing construction this summer. So if anyone is in the Newport, Waldport area and sees a large vessel offshore, what we’re in the process of doing is pulling electrical cables about seven nautical miles offshore to an offshore test facility where companies will be able to deploy their devices, plug in and start to put the first electrons into the electrical grid.

But this is a test facility. It’s not an offshore, it’s a wave energy only facility. So it’s focused on wave energy and it’s a test facility for companies to test devices and start to understand the challenges, the opportunities, the detriments and build this in a rigorously well understood sort of offshore test bed. So that’s going to happen this summer, which is delightful after 10, 12 years of permitting, procurement, and funding, that site will be up and running at the end of this summer and you should be able to see devices deployed there next summer.

Miller: Bryson Robertson, thanks very much.

Robertson: Thank you so much.

Miller: Bryson Robertson is an associate professor of engineering at Oregon State University. He’s also the Director of the Pacific Marine Energy Center.

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