The National Offshore Wind R&D Consortium has announced six new projects to support supply chain efficiency, asset monitoring, and inspection.
Wind Energy Technologies Office
January 12, 2022
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The National Offshore Wind Research and Development Consortium (NOWRDC), which was established with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), has selected six new projects to receive a total of $3.4 million for supply chain efficiency, asset monitoring, and inspection.
The selections announced today include: three new supply chain projects to facilitate U.S. manufacturing, ensure quality component production, and simplify transportation of major wind plant components; and three asset monitoring and inspection projects to reduce operational costs for offshore wind farms.
“Expanding U.S. offshore wind requires an established end-to-end domestic supply chain,” said Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Kelly Speakes-Backman. “The innovations developed under these awards will ensure we can design, manufacture, and install offshore wind technologies right here at home that will ensure our renewable energy future.”
Once contracted, the six new projects, listed below, bring the NOWRDC’s total funding portfolio to $31 million for 46 projects.
Challenge Area: Supply Chain Efficiency and Industrialization
| Awardee Organization | Project Title |
|---|---|
| Electric Power Research Institute | Verifying Offshore Wind Turbine Blade Integrity During Manufacture |
| GE Renewable Energy | Weld Assembly of Large Castings |
| National Renewable Energy Laboratory | Standardized Scalable Mooring Solutions Optimized for the U.S. Supply Chain |
Challenge Area: Asset Monitoring and Inspection
| Awardee Organization | Project Title |
|---|---|
| GE Research | Autonomous Vessel-Based Multi-Sensing System for Inspection and Monitoring |
| University of Massachusetts – Lowell | A Novel Structural Health Monitoring System for Offshore Wind Turbines |
| Dive Technologies | Fully Autonomous Subsea Asset Inspection by a Shore-Launched Autonomous Underwater Vehicle |
“NOWRDC funding enables companies like Dive Technologies to innovate and rapidly scale—supporting local economies, strengthening domestic supply chains, and creating new jobs in advanced manufacturing, data collection, and analysis,” said Sam Russo, Chief Operating Office of Dive Technologies. “This award will allow Dive to deploy our robotic systems to demonstrate all-weather, long-endurance, and fully autonomous seafloor asset health monitoring. This next-generation technology is poised to deliver safer and more cost-efficient seafloor and infrastructure data collection, advancing the nation’s offshore wind goals.”
“These awards support the U.S. domestic supply chain and reflect the need to rapidly adapt and scale it to support the simultaneous production and installation of offshore wind,” said Carrie Cullen Hitt, Executive Director of NOWRDC. Accelerated U.S. offshore wind targets have also highlighted the need for innovative O&M solutions to reduce system downtime or the need for at-sea corrective maintenance activities.”
The full list of NOWRDC’s portfolio of projects is listed at www.nationaloffshorewind.org.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) established NOWRDC in 2018 to address research priorities for offshore wind as defined in the National Offshore Wind Strategy, which was developed jointly by DOE and the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. DOE competitively selected the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) to administer NOWRDC, with DOE and NYSERDA each providing $20.5 million to fund high-impact research projects that lower the costs of U.S. offshore wind. State agencies in Maryland, Virginia, Massachusetts, Maine, and New Jersey have since joined, resulting in a total funding of around $48 million. NOWRDC’s members include major entities in the offshore wind industry.