"Today constitutes a historic moment for offshore wind in the Americas. At 12:00pm, the first offshore wind electrons will flow into the US electric grid," said Dr. Habib Dagher, P.E., Director of the Advanced Structure and Composites Center at the University of Maine, and leader of UMaine's DeepCwind Consortium. Dr. Dagher will be joined by Peter Vigue, President and CEO of the Cianbro Corporation, Jake Ward, VP of the University of Maine, and Dr. William J. Brennan, President of Maine Maritime Academy, to hold a press event on Thursday, June 13th at noon off the coast of Castine, aboard an MMA vessel. The vessel will be anchored alongside the VolturnUS 1:8, a 65-foot-tall prototype floating turbine prototype that is 1:8th the scale of a 6-megawatt (MW), 423-foot rotor diameter design. The VolturnUS, which was designed and built at UMaine, assembled at Cianbro's facility in Brewer, Maine, and successfully towed nearly 30 miles from Brewer to Castine by Maine Maritime Academy, is now anchored off the coast of Castine Maine in 80 ft of water. During the event, the turbine will be turned on, and electricity will flow through an undersea cable to the Central Maine Power electricity grid, making VolturnUS 1:8 the first grid-connected offshore wind turbine in the Americas.
The VolturnUS technology is the culmination of more than five years of collaborative research and development conducted by the University of Maine-led DeepCwind Consortium. The DeepCwind Consortium is a unique public-private research partnership funded by the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation-Partners for Innovation program, Maine Technology Institute, the state of Maine, the University of Maine and includes more than 30 industry partners.
Jose Zayas, Director of the U.S. Department of Energy's Wind and Water Power Technologies Office, recently visited Maine for the turbine's launch, held at Cianbro in Brewer on May 31. "The [VolturnUS] offshore wind project represents a critical investment to ensure America leads in this fast-growing industry, to bring tremendous untapped energy resources to market and create new jobs across the country," said Zayas in an official statement.
Data acquired during the 2013 deployments off Castine will be used to optimize the design of UMaine's patent-pending VolturnUS system. The program goal when the technology is scaled up is to reduce the cost of offshore wind to compete with other forms of electricity generation with no subsidies.
Following this test deployment, the next step for the team is to build two x 6 MW VolturnUS floating turbines to be moored off Monhegan Island in 2016. Design for these giant turbines is currently underway funded in part though a DOE competition called the Advanced Technology Demonstration Program for Offshore Wind. The UMaine Composites Center has partnered with industry leaders to invest in this 12 MW, $96 million pilot farm called New England Aqua Ventus I. The deployments this summer will de-risk UMaine's VolturnUS technology in preparation for connecting the first full-scale unit to the grid in 2016. Maine has 156 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind capacity within 50 miles of its shores and a plan to deploy 5 GW of offshore wind by 2030. The 5 GW plan could potentially attract $20 billion of private investment to the state, creating thousands of jobs.
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