 start so I don't forget that and all right welcome. Good afternoon everyone and welcome to the first in a four-part series from Maine Audubon exploring the potential benefits of floating offshore wind energy in the Gulf of Maine as well as its potential environmental impacts. Today for our first presentation titled Offshore Wind in the Gulf of Maine a Primer we are honored to be joined by Dr Habib Dager the founding executive director of the Advancement Structures and Composite Center at the University of Maine. Before I introduce Dr Dager which I will do I'd like to talk a little bit about why Maine Audubon is hosting this series starting now. More than a century of burning fossil fuels has altered the chemical composition of our atmosphere changing the climate we are accustomed to and throwing the natural world out of balance. Mainers are seeing these changes firsthand as evidenced by scientifically measured three degrees warming trend in the state since 1895 a growing season which has lengthened by about 16 days since 1950 and a Gulf of Maine that is warming faster than almost any other water body on earth. These changes are impacting our wildlife. Moose populations are falling as the warmer winters are permitting the advancement of deadly ticks. Traditionally southern species are showing up in the Maine woods and waters including the Carolina Wren the Black Sea Bass, Lined Seahorse and the Red Bellied Woodpecker. Modeling reports from the National Audubon Society predict that if the current rate of warming continues more than 106 of Maine's bird species will lose habitat in the state by 2050 and some like our iconic common loon will be pushed out of their breeding range entirely. We need to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels or else Maine will no longer be Maine. At the top of the list of ways to achieve this is to convert to electric energy powered by renewable sources. Maine Audubon is a longtime supporter of renewable energy dating to at least the 1970s when our Falmouth headquarters was built with passive solar and radiant heat up until our current work supporting appropriately sited solar and terrestrial wind projects. The potential for offshore wind energy in the Gulf of Maine especially floating offshore wind is far greater than any other source with an estimated 156 gigawatts of energy available for conversion. To put that number in perspective that is more than 70 times the amount of electricity used by the entire state of Maine in an entire year. The opportunity to produce such a large amount of clean renewable energy locally cannot be ignored and deserves full study. We understand that the buildout of floating offshore wind still an experimental technology would have impacts both on the environmental resources and the human uses of the ocean but we owe it to ourselves and to future manors to make every effort to meet our climate goals. So that's why we're launching this series beginning today with Dr. Dogger. We will be hosting three more sessions on consecutive Tuesdays. I just want to run through those very quickly. The next is at 11 a.m. not noon and we'll be hosting Wing Goodale from the Maine-based Biodiversity Research Institute and Oregon State researcher Roberto Albertani to discuss the potential impacts of offshore wind on bird populations in the Gulf. On Tuesday, April 6 at 12.30 we'll be hosting a BAT researcher Trevor Peterson from Stantec as well as some researchers on marine mammals to discuss the offshore wind and the marine environment. And finally on April 13th at noon we'll be hosting Cecilia Cunningham, the Deputy Director of the Governor's Energy Office to discuss the latest developments in the Gulf of Maine. All right and again before I introduce Dr. Dogger just a little technical update. So we are in the webinar format today which means that we cannot hear or see the attendees on. You can type in the chat which comes to us but if you have questions for the end of the program please put them in the Q&A box which you can find along the lower screen. I will be bringing my colleague Eliza Donahue, Maine Audubon's Director of Advocacy back for that portion of the program in case you have questions about Maine Audubon's work or anything like that. So and we are recording this will be available if you have to leave or miss part of it on Maine Audubon's website very soon. Okay so today we're getting started and we are honored to be joined by Dr. Habib Dogger. Before I read a list of titles I think I can be summarized like this. Well when we're talking about who is doing the work to make Maine a center of innovation, who is putting Maine on the map not just as a place to visit for the weekend or vacation but as a place of technological innovation and cutting-edge thinking you know we're talking about Dr. Dogger. He is the founding Executive Director of the University of Maine's Advanced Structures and Composite Center, a massive laboratory dedicated to discovering infrastructure solutions such as more durable roads and bridges, carbon fiber vessels and of particular interest today floating offshore wind turbines. He is the 2015 White House Transportation Champion of Change, the Carnegie Foundation Maine Professor of the Year and the Maine International Trade Center Innovator of the Year among many other accolades. Please welcome Dr. Habib Dogger. Thank you Nick. It's a great pleasure to be with you and I'm the engineer in the group so I'm going to focus a lot of my presentation today about the engineering aspects of floating wind and you'll be the subsequent presentations we'll talk about the environmental ecological aspects of it. So this is engineering 101 of floating offshore wind if you wish as well I'd like to talk about today. So I have a presentation to share so can you see my screen all right? Yes sir. Excellent. So what is floating offshore winds what is New England Aqua Ventus one? If floating wind turbines is a turbine that doesn't is not fixed to the seabed if you have deeper waters like we have off the Gulf of Maine you cannot take turbines directly to the seabed it gets to be too expensive to do so. So if floating turbines almost like think of a ship that's floating but have a tower on it with a turbine supported on it but in our case we're using this design that we have developed for the state of Maine it's called a semi-submersible design. It has three floating columns one, two, and three floatation columns on each corner and one in the center and they're tied under the water with three beams. Now to give you a sense of scale this is not small there's a school bus sitting right here to give you a sense of scale of this particular design. Now since this unit actually floats it needs to be more to the seabed so it has mooring lines attached to it. In our case we're using three mooring lines one two and three they could be made out of steel chain or synthetic mooring systems and then how does the power come back to shore in this case it comes back with an undersea cable. The cable comes down from the turbine down the tower down the side of the hull and comes up from the bottom of the hull and makes an S shape and then eventually is fixed to the seabed and and bury it whatever you can we can bury it. Now there's a buoyancy modules on the floatation electric cable to allow it to follow the hull because the hull is not going to stay in one place it is moored like a ship would be moored as the wind changes direction and the wave changes direction the hull will also move around a little bit and it's important for the electrical cable to follow the hull and that's why we have a dynamic portion of the cable but the majority of the cable is fixed and and under under the sea buried under the sea where you can bury it. Now this design is called the semi-submersible. The work has been funded by the U.S. Department of Energy right now for over a decade and under a program called the advanced technology demonstration program for offshore wind. This particular design the university has over 60 patents on it can be made locally. It has been approved by the American Bureau of Shipping for a six megawatt hull that was designed. It's been offshore tested and according to the National Renewable Energy Lab if we can scale up the technology when we're actually making a lot of these units for larger projects the price can go down below six cents a kilowatt hour including the interconnect to shore. So well I'll talk about a little bit about the center where I work a bit more about floating turbines why why in Maine what do they look like what are the different designs out there then I'll talk about the research in floating turbines that we've done since 2008 while we got started and then the next step for us is New England Aquaventus 1 a single turbine to be placed off Monhegan Island by 2023 and I'll open it up to questions. So this is the research lab where I work at the University of Maine in the Orno campus. We're the largest university based research center in the state of Maine and we're 25 years old as a center. We have 260 people who work in the lab faculty staff and students and we've had over 2500 students from over 35 majors on campus come and work in this laboratory. The students can work up to 30 hours a week during the academic year and full time in the summer and the breaks. We've had over 10 companies that spun off our lab using from technology development in this laboratory over 25,000 visitors to the lab and these are our partners and clients from across the globe so these are companies or research institutes that work with us on developing new materials. Now our strategic plan was was updated in 2020 and it's called GEM for green energy and materials. So our goal here is to make contributions to the world in developing green materials and green energy and that's where we're heading as an organization. To give you a sense of some of the facilities inside the lab this is an example of a wind blade test in our laboratory in Orno. This is a 165 foot wind blade being tested to simulate the effects of 20 years of life on the turbine and you can see this is a this turbine this blade is as long as 16 stories being tested as you see in the lab to certify it so we know it could be it can sustain the environment offshore. We do this work with OEMs these are the manufacturers of wind turbines. Another facility we've added at the university is called the W Square Wave Wind Basin the Alfaan W Square Wave Wind Basin thanks to support from the Alfaan Foundation and what's unique about this facility it can recreate both a wind storm and a wave storm. There are wave basins across the country there are wind tunnels across the country but we're the first to put the two together to be able to recreate storms that are important to validate designs of offshore wind turbines and chips and so forth. You can see here there's a floating turbine sitting in front of the open jet wind tunnel and that's a 150 scale version of a larger unit and we test that in the laboratory as we develop new technologies. This is what the wave wind basin looks like to give you a sense of how we validate new technologies. These are examples of waves being produced in the laboratory waves can come from different directions and this is the open jet wind tunnel that allows us to also create wind storms and we can change wind speed with height very much like what occurs offshore. We can change wind directions we can change wave directions and we also test wind turbines in this laboratory floating wind turbines and here's an example of a floating wind turbine in a 50-year storm and you can see how we can validate if you wish the designs using a facility like that. Now are we the only ones thinking of offshore winds not at all actually Europe built its first offshore wind farm in 1991 they have over 5000 turbines in the US the same thing is happening there's a there's a if you wish a major move to help power coastal cities in coastal states using offshore wind. The size of these orange circles is the size of the farm that's being proposed there's a whole bunch of them out there and notice in Maine there's New England Aqua Ventus 1 which is our single turbine project which will be an 11 megawatt turbine. What's unique about Maine in many other parts of the country particularly the west coast is we have deep waters off of our coast what's been built in Europe since 1991 the projects you see south of us here on the west on the east coast are all today fixed bottom turbines but in Maine we have deep waters and therefore we cannot use fixed bottom turbines if you're about three nautical miles off the coast of Maine you're in about 300 feet of water so it's not feasible to use fixed bottom turbines at least cost-effective to do so and what you see here in dark blue and in light blue are the areas where you have deep waters in dark blue and light in shallower waters in light blue and you can see here the light blue areas in southern New England as well as the mid-Atlantic states where all these projects are fixed bottom projects are being proposed in Maine we have no choice but to go to floating because we have deep waters if you look at the west coast it's the same situation they have only deep waters so about 60 percent of the US offshore wind resource could be harness using floating technology so floating technology is a very important part not only to the US but also throughout the world and now looking at the state of Maine we ran some numbers a number of years ago back in 2009 and 10 if you recall when energy prices oil prices went up to four dollars a gallon Maine was was was in a crisis because families in Maine were at the time anticipated to spend about $10,000 per year on on energy costs per family and that's five thousand dollars per year in gasoline four thousand dollars per year in heating oil and a thousand dollars per year in electricity and that represents a close to 20 percent of the average family income in the state of Maine so we were in a crisis mode and we're trying to find ways to reduce costs to to Maine families we looked at all kinds of renewable opportunities in the state of Maine we looked at solar which is important we looked at more hydrodams in the state we looked at wave energy tidal energy and land-based wind offshore wind and we came to the conclusion that all of them are important but the the the the big opportunity in the state of Maine is offshore wind because we have so much of it we can scale to electrify heating and transportation to put that in perspective we estimated back in 2009 that if we only harness three percent of the offshore wind resource in the Gulf of Maine we can heat every home and drive every car and that's the impetus for us to move forward and help clean up the environment if you wish and and hopefully create lots of jobs at the same time of course this comes with a with a big environmental responsibility as well as responsibility to the other users of the ocean including the fishing industry in our state so for any plan like that to move forward it needs to to take into account all all the important consistencies but another number I'd like to to put put out there that based on EIA the energy information administration numbers the state of Maine has been spending over the last many years between 3.6 and 5.8 billion dollars in fossil fuels and these are fossil fuels that are putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere so so essentially we're burning about three to six billion dollars worth of fossil fuels and the CO2 and the greenhouse gases are going in the air if we can electrify heating and transportation in our state using resources such as offshore wind and other renewables we can make a big dent into into those numbers and plus at the same time we can keep a lot of these dollars in the state of Maine and help create jobs in Maine as well in the meantime so what do floating turbines look like from an engineering perspective ironically enough floating turbine designs are derived from oil and gas floating rigs and and there are three different types of floating oil and gas rigs and floating wind turbine types one is called ispar buoy the second is called a semi submersible and the third one is called the tension light platform ispar buoy is like a big tube floating tube with a mass at the very bottom these tubes in the real world could be 300 feet long under the water could be 20 plus feet in diameter they're full of air except at the very bottom of the tube there's there's a balance or a mass as if you you were to take a water bottle and empty it out and then put some sand at the bottom of it and place it in a bathtub that water bottle will stand up and the more sand you put in the more it goes down but it'll stand up to a certain point and that's what ispar is and to keep it on station it's got three mooring lines on it so the disadvantage it needs a very deep draft 300 feet plus a draft the semi submersible is very similar except it's got a much shallower draft it also needs three mooring lines just like this one does like this part does but in this case you have smaller floatation columns or floatation bodies if you think of a if a catamaran if you've sailed a catamaran the catamaran has two hulls and how do you make a catamaran more stable you can make the hull bigger and you have a more stable catamaran or you can put the hulls farther apart you have a more stable catamaran where in our case this is a trimaran we have one two or three hulls and the tower support in the center now so this is a trimaran but if you put a trimaran out or catamaran out in the middle of the ocean it's going to float away so you need to keep it on station that's why you have three mooring lines and finally the last design is called the tension leg platform what it is you have a buoyancy buoyancy body under the water full of air that wants to pop out of the water and then what keeps it from popping out of the water is you have tension legs to the seabed that anchor it down and give it that overturning moment capacity so these are the three designs we looked at all of them and try to identify what works best in the in the Gulf of Maine and what works best is a semi submersible because the spar has a 300 foot draft and you can't fabricate a dockside in the Gulf of Maine and throw it out to sea so there are though a lot of different designs of floating turbines as far as I know today there's more than 40 out there out there today when we started back in 2008 there was a couple us and a couple others and um in our design it's called volturnus you could see it right here so there's a lot of different ways if you wish to float a wind turbines and there's an international race to develop these different technologies and and and our major programs being developed in Europe and in Southeast Asia to put floating farms out there right now France has a bid request right now Scotland for floating farms as well as well as in Southeast Asia so there's a big race right now because it's a there's a major opportunity globally and we're part of that race in the state of Maine and and we're built we built this volturnus technology back in 2013 we we designed and built under a DOE grant the first floater that that we built in our laboratory and deployed off Castine Maine it was a one-to-eight scale version of a bigger unit and notice that we used square floatation columns versus round because it was cheaper to do it that way at the time and and it was an exciting day for Maine we had over 1500 people come come to visit visit us when we launched that haul and and it was fabricated at U-Maine in pieces and assembled in Brewer we shipped it from U-Maine to Brewer on three flatbed trucks assembled it there and launched it from Brewer and and we put it into the Ponobscot River and towed it out to sea using a Maine maritime tugboat and it was about a 10 hour tug and and then when we when it got to Castine we had pre-installed three mooring lines the Rebuid and we had an undersea cable that was pre-installed and and and when when he got there we hooked up the three mooring lines to each one of the three floatation columns and we hooked up the undersea cable to to the turbine and we also had about 60 sensors on board the goal of the the the the project was not to generate a lot of electricity was to actually see if we can predict the motions of the hull in that environment can we really predict what happens to to a floating hull under winds and waves and currents and so on and so forth that was the purpose of the experiment it's not really an energy generation experiment and uh so this is what it looked like off Castine in 2013 and on June 2013 we stayed in Maine made history because we were able to connect that to shore and and this became the first time that offshore wind electron flew into the U.S. grid notice near the site we have also a floating lidar there that actually measures wind speeds at hub height and measures waves and winds at that location and currents you see the white the white uh buoys here that's where the mooring anchors were so there's mooring lines to the mooring anchors just like you would have on a boat and the undersea cable goes down to to someone's house in Castine here that's worked with us this is an example of the very first storm we saw it was in December 2013 it was called winter storm electron what's what's blown across here is actually snow and if you look at the white caps in that picture you could see the size of the wave relative to the size of the hull the very big waves relative to the size of the hull because it was one to eight scale version of the full size unit so it saw big waves very in a very short time and you could see here the waves that it saw the 50 year waves don't even move it you can't even see the motions of the hull in a 50 year wave and that's really what we tried to design is something that is very stable offshore what we found is that in a 500 year storm it moved off vertical less than seven degrees so that was a good validation of the technology that we know what we're doing in essence and uh needless to say that was an exciting moment for the entire research team that worked on this project and this is some of the data we collected but I wanted to show you a shot here of of a wave and notice how big the wave is the wave actually submerged completely one of the floatation columns this happens to be close to a 500 year wave and in the Gulf of Maine a 500 year wave from peak to trough is roughly 70 feet well 70 feet high so imagine what this unit is seeing in that in that environment but in that environment uh during that year and a half that we put it out there um we we saw 40 storms between a 50 year and a 500 year return period and in all storms the maximum heel angle off vertical was less than less than seven degrees and the maximum acceleration at the at the nacelle level was two tenths of a gene and what you see in red and blue is our predictive models and and the data we collected for acceleration of the hull and notice that we're able to predict very closely how much acceleration the hull saw and that's really what was the purpose of this whole experiment that was we're not going out there and have generate a lot of electricity we're just trying to this was a test to see if we can we can evaluate the motions of the hull accurately so what's next the next step of the project is to go bigger and it's kind of crawl before you walk walk before you run and and the main legislature has over the many years created a test site off the coast of the coast of monhegan island there was there were three sites that were created through the main legislature and and one of them was assigned to the university of main to to do to do some testing of next generation technologies and in this case we are placing a single turbine that's the goal of monhegan island two and a half miles south of that and using this fault known as concrete hull design we were joined by two companies rwe and the miss vici corporation through its diamond generating corporation that are invested in this in this project and they formed a company called new england aqua ventis to to build the hull and and help us test it the u.s. yes the partner of energy is also involved very heavily in this and of course the state of main has has enabled all of this through legislation that's been passed over the last decade the the site is off monhegan island if you're in main monhegan island it is right here you can see where that is off the coast of main the this is what the site geotechnical physical location physical conditions look like about 300 feet of water at the site where the turbine will go the blue line you see here is is three nautical miles off monhegan that's a demarcation line between state waters and federal waters so the hull would float in this pink area which was designated for us by the state of main and the hull is made out of five major components one one one piece one is called the central column there are three radial columns number two one two and three floatation columns there are three is is radial beams one two and three under the water and finally five are our ties that tie the top of the columns together there's steel four foot diameter pipes that tie all four floatation columns together the hull is built like a bridge upside down and what we wanted to do is is have the ability to fabricate the hull locally so that we can create local jobs and what we did is borrowed from the bridge construction industry a technology called segmental concrete construction these are bridges built by making legos of concrete if you wish that are stacked together in post tensions to form a bridge what you see in the upper left hand corner is what a bridge might look like where you have four piers in the water and the bridge superstructure connecting the piers so traffic would be running on top of those if you take that and flip it upside down you get our hull so our hull is like a bridge except it's built upside down and you can see here the components of the hull this is an example of a similar bridge technology that's used to build the seralon bridge between main and and new hampshire it was and it was it was built using these blocks of concrete that were fabricated near the site and some of them were actually fabricated and brought in from from a farther distance and they were stacked together as you see using a crane and then post tension vertically squeezed together if you wish to fit to form a monolithic section it's the same construction technology we'll be using to build the hull except we'll be building it dark side and then putting it into the water afterwards but one potential location we've been looking at to to build it is in Brewer main the other is in Searsport main and now how do you anchor it to the seabed there are a lot of different ways you can anchor it and most of the anchor technology is borrowed from the oil and gas industry in our case we're looking at two different systems right now we're looking at a steel chain system with a drag anchor like that and we're also potentially looking at a synthetic mooring system that would have a smaller footprint on the seabed the this talk about the steel chain system what you see in dark black are the mooring lines so there's one two three mooring lines and then they they are connected to an anchor on the seabed the anchor that we plan to use with a steel chain is is called a drag anchor it's been used for decades in the oil and gas industry and other applications it looks like it looks like that and it looks like a plow if you wish and you drag that along the seabed in the mud as you drag it it embeds itself because of the plow shape at the end of the at the end of the drag anchor and when you have enough depth you have enough pulled capacity to hold the turbine together so we have three of these mooring anchors at the location shown in in in brown right here and the the the turbine itself is shown in green that's where the turbine is and we have three black lines here these are the three mooring lines the white lines are temporary anchors to help us set the others so now the beauty of these is they don't make noise when you put a man and then the the hull that we've designed we've designed it for a hundred year life and we'll talk we can talk more about that later which reduces the environmental footprint of the technology significantly a typical offshore wind farms today made out of steel have about a 25 year life where the turbine would have to be replaced or still may have to be replaced we've designed our turbine for a hundred year life or half a hundred in your life not the turbine so that every 25 years you can actually tow the hull back to shore put no turbine on and send it back out so so so the environmental footprint if you wish is significantly reduced in the long run and the costs are reduced so that's how we you hook it up to the seabed the the other very important part of this experiment is not just an engineering experiment it's also an environmental experiment and what I say environmental studies are so critical for us to understand how we do future developments so the purpose of this this environmental studies here is to evaluate using the single turbine the effect of a floating turbine on its environment including the birds the bats as well as people who use the environment around it working with the fisheries and so forth so it's an experiment and when you do an experiment you try to keep it small crawl before you walk walk before you run so you don't make mistakes at a large scale so this is an opportunity for all of us to learn not only on the on the technology side but also on the environmental side so we've had a number of of experts in the environmental side bird biologists fish biologists marine mammal biologists and others to have been collecting data at that site of monhegan island that was designated by the state we've collected bentos data fish data marine mammal data bird data bat data noise and vibration data electromagnetic fields geophysical data the racial data and we've done some also aesthetics and visual surveys to see what it would look like from different different locations on the coast as well as cultural historic studies these are baseline studies to understand what the current condition of that environment is and when we come in and bring the single turbine in there and hook it up to the seabed we're going to continue to do studies like that to be able to compare if you wish the before and after and be better understand the impact of this turbine on its environment and that's a big part of what we're trying to understand as we move forward and another major concern we have and we'd like to understand better is how the cables the mooring lines and anchors interact with the fisheries and and we look forward to work with with the fishing industry to do some case case evaluations of how close can you fish for this and and what impact it would have on the fishing industry now in terms of the engineering side I promise you engineering work we we uh when we design one of these hulls we use a lot of engineering tools that's an example of some of our numerical models showing a 50-year return period wave and some magnified motion so the hulls you can see what it would look like under a wave in the bottom you can see the stresses that the hull sees as it moves as the waves move through it if you wish but and these are the color codes are the actual stresses it sees and that's how these are the kinds of tools we use to design it and typically when we design a hull like that we run up to 80,000 different load cases these are different winds and wave combinations and as well as currents and ice loading and snow loading and and so on and so forth those are the kinds of conditioners we design a hull like that for and finally this is a bit more about the mooring line the the the electric cable the electric cable as I said will come down from the turbine down the tower and down the side of the hull through a j2 and then it comes vertically down the j2 up through some buoyancy modules and and then there's a friction clamp and an anchor at the seabed that fixes that and from there on the cable the goal is to try to bury the cable to the extent that you can and that's why there's an offshore survey taking place right now is to try to figure out which way and how much we can bury the cable to try to minimize impact on the environment and in the fisheries. Now I'd like to say that I'm not going to go all over this but this didn't start overnight this whole effort had had origins back in 2006-2007 with ocean energy institutes and in 2008 the governor governor's ocean energy task force was put together that I happened to serve on a bipartisan task force that passed number of pieces of legislation to to move this whole effort forward so so this so the university of Maine is really working to to under this particular construct that the state has put together in supporting the state to help us get there as efficiently as possible but as the governor's if you need to know what's next the governor's energy office is is doing has a website that has a lot more data about what the state plans are as they move forward there's there's quite answers to a lot of frequently asked questions as well so I invite you to go to the governor's energy office offshore wind websites to dig into more of the details of where the state would like to go but we all know the state has established some the climate council some some very aggressive goals and an offshore wind is it is a part of that is a part of helping us get where we need to be at scale particularly electrifying heating transportation but also offshore wind is is is part of the economic development strategy for the state of Maine and we at the university are helping the state help implement that particular strategy and the strategy this is this is a the main economic development strategy report you're welcome to go look at that and you could see that the state would like to use offshore wind is is is an opportunity to create jobs as well in terms of where the state is going in 2013 I showed you we put the 1 to 8 scale off of castine in 2023 our goal is to have a single turbine and learn as much as we can from that the state's also been planning a research array to also help us learn more before we go to anything bigger and and it's kind of a crawl before you walk walk before your run approach in the first turbine in 2023 will give us a lot to learn from and the next logical step was to put maybe 10 to 12 turbines in the Gulf of Maine and really study them and evaluate the the impacts on the environment and the fisheries and so forth by all working together and hopefully find solutions that we can all agree on or or find problems that we want to try to avoid so so by by having this very deliberate and careful approach and collecting data as we go we minimize impact on the environment in the fisheries and other uses of the ocean but now I'd like to premise that by saying that nothing that we do as a society as humans on earth I have a zero impact in my environment we will have an impact and the goal of this deliberate approach is to help minimize that impact and maximize benefit to society both environmental benefits global change benefits as well as as the job jobs and economic development benefits so and this is where I'd end thank you very much fantastic Dr. Dogger thank you so very much there is a lot going on thank you for being in the middle of it I want to open things up for questions now please if you could put them in the Q&A box not in the chat it's much easier to keep track of them there and I'd like to get started maybe if I could ask a quick clarification there's a number of questions in the chat and in the news now about what's going on around Monhegan just to clarify so there's one test turbine scheduled to go in a few miles off Monhegan and then the next step would be a 12 turbine array where would that go is that near Monhegan as well we're still looking for a site is that correct the state's still looking for a site in really engaging with different constituencies and users of the ocean to identify the site that makes sense to people so so the state is engaging that right now is having a number of seminars and collecting data and information for that we don't know where that site's going to go yet okay so I don't know it's going to go let's just someone right um there are some a few questions about you mentioned a 3% wind capture number actually and I'd like to bring my colleague Eliza Donahue back on if she if if she can sorry I forgot that she's our director of advocacy she's on just in case there are questions for made on the bond's work Dr. Dagger you mentioned a you know trying to capture 3% of the wind energy could you talk about uh sort of spatially what capturing 3% might look like very good question Nick so um the numbers again uh I'm not advocating that we should capture 3% of the Gulf of Maine energy I just I think this was an exercise we asked ourselves is how much of the Gulf of Maine offshore wind resource do we need to actually harness in order to electrify heating and transportation in the state of Maine if we want to use electric cars all of us by 2050 would have electric cars let's assume that if all of us are going to use electric heat pumps to heat our homes but how much electricity do we need and if if we chose to do that using offshore wind what would we do so I'm not advocating to do 3% of the Gulf of Maine I'm just this was more of a hypothetical exercise Nick to try to figure out how much do we need so what we found that is if we harness 3% of the offshore wind resource in the Gulf of Maine what that means is is 3% of the area within 50 miles of the Gulf of Maine so 50 miles of the coast which 3% do we need do we want to use so that that's what we would need we would need 3% of the surface area of the Gulf of Maine to heat every home and drive every car okay that's that's what we would need and the question really is for all of us is first do we want to do that or not okay and two and two if we're going to do it where do we do it and and that's really some of the important environmental ecological and fisheries question that we all have to ask ourselves roll up our sleeve work together to do that but but but what the number tells us here is it's not a lot it's 3% of the Gulf of Maine 3% heats every home and drives every car so so the other 97% could still be be be business as usual okay as we move forward that's really why we did this exercise is to to to to try to put a perspective as to what's needed to be honest offshore excellent thanks a sort of technical question here from Steven about the nacelle versus the turbine itself maybe could you quickly just describe the different parts of the whole structure and then he asks does the nacelle rotate or does the entire hull rotate I'm sorry which pieces are moving here sure sure very good question but can you see where my cursor is or I can go let me go let me go to a bigger slide that would be easier to see can you see my cursor yep okay so let's start let's start from the top down so you've you've got the blades right and we all know the blades rotates okay and they rotate typically at 12 rpm to 15 revolutions per minute essentially that's what the blades do okay so they rotate to generate electricity now when when the when the let's go down to the very bottom the bottom is you have the hull itself the hull is moved correct to the seabed so the hull can move around in a certain watch circle but can't go away forever because eventually the mooring anchors the mooring lines would keep it on station so the hull can move around in what we call in a watch circle and not in a very big watch circle you're talking 50 feet or so it moves around depending on how much wind there is and so forth so so the hull will move now but it can't rotate very much either on it's a lot around or around the vertical around the tower so if you if you think about the the tower if you hold down to a tower with your hand and turn it okay a lot around a vertical axis the hull can actually move some it's called the yaw motion a little bit like that but not a lot but what's really important is the turbine itself will point always point into the wind so so so therefore the the rotor itself that you see here will rotate and always be pinpointing facing the wind okay and that's called the yaw motion so so so the turbine itself can yaw about that axis so does that answer the question thank you very much um another question here from george is how deep would you expect a cable to be buried it's a it's a very good question yeah i do actually i'm gonna i'm gonna show you an example here um so there's been a lot of we've had undersea cables in the Gulf of Maine for decades that that's how we power the islands in many islands in the Gulf of Maine isboro being one of them for example i'm going to go to isboro so isboro has a subsea cable from the west coast of isboro to to north port and and um and that cable was initially installed in 1955 okay so and and then back in 2015 they they installed a new cable and they buried it about six feet in the mud okay so you want to try to bury it about six feet in the mud in this case they they're able to find mud and they buried the majority of that cable as far as i know at the time that cable is owned by cmp central Maine power and powers islesboro so so so um so there's a long history in Maine to power the islands like that that's not the only cable we have so so our cable is no different so they give you a difference here our cable is going to go from monhegan to uh to boot bay but uh what we the goal here is is to try to bury it as well to the extent that you can you can't bury it everywhere because there are some rock outcrops closer to the surface sometimes so the one purpose of that survey you've been hearing about is try to figure out how much mud there is so you can bury the cable and minimize the impact on the fisheries now in terms of the size of the cable it hasn't been completely designed yet but it'll be between six and eight inches in diameter uh the cable and and then the one that we used that was used for islesboro put it in 2015 is about four inches in diameter so so we're gonna go from four to six inches or four to eight inches in our case for the cable and i have one actually in my office i'm gonna hold this so you see see what it looks like it's walking into the ocean back there there we go yeah yeah i'm gonna go go to the ocean can you see that can you see the cable yeah wow that's it that's the cable so it's not much difference than the ones we've been burying in the Gulf of Maine for decades okay to power the islands i just want to make sure people understand that there's a lot of confusion there's nothing new here in the cable technology that's that's being used in here so excellent and uh and i got another slide about the cable as well comparing the asboro cable and the monhegan cable that's being proposed so the asboro's four inches the monhegan six to eight inches the goal the the asboro cable was 345 kv the monhegan 66 kv and so on the goal is to bury them to the extent you can whatever you can you bury it whatever you can't one one one option is to cover it with concrete pads to prevent um uh prevent it from being snagged if you wish um and typically it's about a six foot deep trench if you can bury it so and uh and the asboro cable is buried about six feet uh but they stopped burying it when they got to a water depth of 10 feet then they laid it down on the seat okay excellent thank you very much does that answer the question uh absolutely i believe it does we have some similar questions from uh barbara and steven here about sort of the other aspect what happens when it gets to shore um and i don't know if this a lot depends on where eventual fields would be but um what happens when it connects to land would there be lots of infrastructure needed there or uh what would that look like yeah for for a single turbine project of course it's a lot simpler right you got a very single turbine so the monhegan project is a single turbine single cable and and the goal here um uh niav new england aqua ventis has a lot of qa on our website about about the cable and the the goal was to bury it until you get to a substation buried into into the roadway until you get to a substation um and uh and there are a lot of buried cables like this already um in different places in the in the state of Maine there's there's nothing new there so the goal is to bury it to the substation that's where you plug it in essentially thanks and there's a question about the potential for uh and this is maybe way down the line but an offshore substation is that something that uh would be considered or when would that need to come into play that that's a possibility in the future to have offshore substations of course the state of Maine is nowhere close to to thinking about those you have to or anything like that we're you know this is you know you're talking 20 maybe 20 29 20 30 where we start thinking about these things but but uh but uh but there's a lot of time to do that and there's there are technologies being developed for floating substations as well and and just you know our hull um as as it sits right now is capable of of holding up the the floating substation in terms of its capacity so great thanks um you mentioned 50 year storms 500 year storms um john asks uh how sort of what's the high end of that consideration he asked about a possible earthquake induced tsunami um uh can you talk a little bit about that sort of how far what the largest size wave you can handle yeah yeah this um you know um the we're designing right now the the designs that we have are following guidelines put out by the by the american bureau shipping so the american bureau shipping has a guideline for building and classing floating offshore wind turbines and part of that guideline the first thing you need to do is figure out what environment you need to design for how much wind how much waves how much coincidence and winds and wave what direction does the wind come from what direction do the waves come from uh and and what kind of extreme waves you're going to look at as well uh whether you want to look at uh so breaking waves and other types of waves so all of that is part of not only waves but also icing conditions and snow and so on and so forth so so all of that is part of the design criteria that we use so what we use is we we work with med ocean energy experts that's what they do uh med ocean condition experts um and that we have them on our project and that's what they do for a living they try to figure out what the biggest wave possible is and uh and that's what they they spend their life studying and designing and so we work with with folks who develop these conditions for us then we plug these conditions into this guide and then from that comes out eight roughly 80 000 different load situations that we consider so so think about not just one or two or three load cases 80 000 different ways that this thing can be hit by the winds or the waves and so on and so forth and and then that's how we design it to make sure it survives so so the question is an important question but but uh but there are there's a process if you wish that you go by to have safe structures out of the environment do we know everything of course we don't know everything they can always be a possibility for for major storms to hit us here in the Gulf of Maine and and we actually as part of our designs we're evaluating that we're looking at the history of extreme storms in the Gulf of Maine including including very unique storms that would come in and like we had in New Jersey and so on so forth not long ago and and so we're studying these storms actually we have statistical methods of predicting what is the possibility of one of these storms and designing for those conditions as well so excellent thanks um quickly i see a few questions in the chat about birds and how uh and monhegan's relationship to birds i'm a bird or myself and i visit monhegan frequently it's one of my favorite spots on earth for birding um we are going to dive into the topic of birds and the Gulf of Maine next week with really in-depth discussions about different bird populations in the Gulf how they may be impacted and then some of the technologies that may be available to help reduce or mitigate those impacts so i encourage folks to stay tuned next week and you can register on our website for that presentation um dr doger a question from Nancy here about why the monhegan site was chosen for this test to turbine there's a long history about the monhegan site selection again it has i'll go back and explain there's a number there's pieces of legislation that was put together to do test sites that was the the beginning so the governor's ocean energy task force in 2008 um stated some energy goals for the state of Maine out of that task force work that it spent over a year um i recommended creating test sites for for testing new technologies because we can't go out there and build commercial farms without testing them first so it was a cautious approach so and uh and it was a lot younger at the day and i and i sat with a lot of very smart people who wanted wanted a really planned this right and so the so the so the task force put together legislation put together recommendations and ld 1465 that was established which is a legislation to create test sites okay and so the state of Maine went out there actually surveyed the populations up and down the coast and including fishermen and said okay where can we build these these units and and they they looked at a they started with 10 sites and eventually kind of down to three that were okay for people to use and then one of them was monhegan that the state has actually developed as part of this this this effort and and the state of the university of Maine was assigned that to work on that site and and and we've been busy since then since 2009 and 10 to try to try to get to this point so it's been a long road so excellent so i see we are at 1259 i i see there are more questions in the chat i'm going to do one last question from chip here are you considering larger turbines to reduce the number of turbines or can you talk a little bit about the sort of scaling possibilities for the turbines themselves that's a very very good question and i wish we had more time to talk about it the answer is yes what's happening with this industry not only in Maine but globally turbines are getting bigger and bigger and the reason for that is they get less expensive if you have less turbines out there you have less units to maintain you have less news to deploy you have less mooring lines less anchors that's less foundations and so on and so forth so so the philosophy in the industry from an engineering perspective has been to go to larger units because you minimize costs and minimize impact and and and you could see when we when we first started the monhegan project our goal was to put two six megawatt units okay and and at the time there were the biggest units that that would possibly be available and and and today here we are years later and and no those six megawatt units aren't being made anymore so so so the same company that's making six megawatt you know shut down their line and they're making 12 megawatts that's GE they're making 12 megawatts plus right now plus 13 and more just uh just uh over the last few weeks 15 megawatt turbine was announced by one of the major OEMs as well so so yes the answer is the industry is going to larger turbines and and and we've already accounted for that in our design because we had two six megawatt units for monhegan and now we're at a single 11 megawatt so so we went from two units to one unit already in monhegan so the effect of that is already taking place in our project okay those decisions haven't made yes okay well I want to thank you Dr. Dogger so much for joining us today there's a whole bunch of uh thank yous and kudos in the chat um so and I want to echo those thank you so much for joining us thank you for your work and uh we look forward to the future in the Gulf of Maine thank you Nick looking forward to work with all of you and and the fishing industry and roll up our sleeves and figure out how to do it right absolutely thank you very much have a good afternoon everyone yeah bye bye