the again this cooling I'm talking about is very very small is like a tenth of a degree but nonetheless it's cooling but it is clearly associated with location locations where the heat flux is actually being reduced so a reduced in a reduction in magnitude of the heat flux at the surface indeed should cause cooling so that is a correct mechanism the point is why doesn't the convergence and divergence doesn't dominate over this and the reason is that basically these are ginormous very tall wind turbines taller than anything we have ever looked at before and so on the left are the results from the simulations that I showed you with which are for the extreme size turbines that are planned for future development they have a hub height of 120 meters actually I think this is already too old they're very very tall right and you can see a cross section here in the vertical with the cooling aloft the warming starting below hub hub and below the rotor but it doesn't get all the way to the surface so basically this divergence or convergence area remains elevated and at the surface we remain dominated by the reduction of the heat flux by contrast if you we did the simulation for a conventional turbine with a hub height of 80 meters which is what we've always been simulating and in that case we do see the warming reach the surface so I guess this is good news that if the turbines are getting even taller then maybe this warming and this cooling is even further away from the surface and everything is going to be dominated by the heat flux is being reduced at the surface so in conclusion I would like to emphasize the three impacts or effects that occur more or less all the time in order of certainty absolute certainty that there will be reduced wind speed at the surface which has already been taken for granted in many of the simulations of ocean processes and wind stresses from wind farms that's check reduced turbulence in my experience is in 90% of the cases so sometimes in unstable conditions you might not see this because it's already so turbulent but reduced turbulence at the surface should be expected and reduced heat fluxes most of the times this is the hardest one to actually quantify in the field and if you're looking at surface temperature effects which have not really been discussed much today there are many factor that matter as you hopefully were convinced stability literally flips the sign of your temperature effect so you can expect warming in stable conditions and actually cooling in unstable so I cannot give you an answer it really depends on the stability and the divergence of the heat flux is the mechanism that seems to be very important to understand surface effects and turbine hub height has an impact as well and the turbines getting taller and taller probably is good news for effects on the ocean surface I tried to go as fast as I can to make up for the time but that's it. No, thank you that's very interesting. Yeah, please. Hey so I guess I have two questions first one about your last last slide where you about the differences in size were you only changing the hub height or were you also changing the diameter of the rotor? Also the diameter was a completely different turbine I know what you mean, yes. And then the second one is in your simulations over the ocean have you considered the effects of the ocean lower boundary layer feedback of that on your warf boundary layer? So the sea surface temperature anything about the ocean was held constant as actually not constant it was we got initial conditions and the boundary conditions from whatever I don't remember exactly but there was no interaction no feedback no one way or two way nothing. Okay, thank you Christina Alina are you doing the okay, yeah Was it me? Yeah, I don't Two related questions does the wind deficit at the surface scale with wind speed meaning is it like a percent of the wind speed or do you see that it's a constant deficit and then my other question was what was the other question well let's go with that one first I don't remember Everything scales pretty much everything scales with wind speed I wanted to show actual values in the paper because of the threshold of detectability because if it's below 0.5 it's almost impossible to detect anyway but yeah it scales okay all the wind speed deficit they tend to have a Gaussian self-seminarity shape so it depends on the speed and I remember my second question that's okay right thanks Doug as the turbines get bigger do you you presented that number of like four turbine likes downstream where the surface deficit and winds happens is that something you would expect to be scaled based on turbine size or as the turbines get bigger and the rotors get further from the ocean surface are there other processes at play that might impact that no I expect that parameter to remain the same but keeping my don't memorize 4 to 5d because that's correct for a single turbine when you're getting to a farm it's actually even even closer and if you're thinking about how far downwind would awake last if you have a single turbine it can be 20 diameters a single turbine wake can be 20 diameters but when you have a farm and I don't know what the diameter of a farm is but you might have some kind of typical length maybe the width of the farm or the length of the farm that wake is not going to go 20 times that length it's more going to be like 3 to 4 times that length there's some very bizarre nonlinear processes that go on I don't know who decides yeah no I was going to say Chen yeah go ahead yeah you know I like your results because after we run for you know wind effect we worry about our results we get it wrong because we find in the surface the wind you know we're 10 meter winds change so small even winter time the maximum 0.4 meter per second the changers so the surface so we think oh everybody talk about the wind awake so why we get so small but your results are very clear sure that you said you know the surface effect is very small yeah so yeah that we find it's important it's very important yeah we get results we find it's so small so then we draw the circulation we didn't find a circulation change a lot but definitely change something but not change because even winter time we change like 0.4 meter per second but the most wind in the winter time 7 and 10 meter per second but then average wind in the offshore region but then it changes 0.4 meter per second it's very small so we didn't find a circulation pattern changes so I was we was worried about it we just go go go to check it check it as we get it wrong or something but so your results are consistent we feel the heavy good good yeah you have to you know wind speed deficit you need to ask at what height is this taken because everybody wants to show the strongest effects right at 120 meters at the surface second deficit no way yes nice I don't know Eileen yeah go ahead yeah too many mics on sorry sorry I'm just curious can you say a couple words about how you modeled with your LES the rotor momentum extraction was this just a drag law or what did you do there yeah we used actually three actuator lines which means that we could see the blades each blade was aligned with some 30 points grid points on it and then there was a very sophisticated way to incorporate the push of the wind as well as the rotation that would occur simultaneously yeah I have a slide and show you later yeah okay thanks yeah this is kind of a wacky late afternoon question scared but I'm amazed at how high these rotor heights are getting do people have to climb up to service that and to the top of the tip oh my gosh because I nearly fell off the flight deck of an aircraft carrier and that was only 60 meters and I was afraid so I couldn't imagine going up that high in fact you would never be allowed to go alone it has to be in pairs of two people with training and all because if one passes out the other has to save you so pairs oh okay that makes it a little bit easier yeah go ahead yeah to respond to still you don't have to climb up no they have elevators our turbine has an elevator too to respond to that remark that's also a good argument why there is now a lot of discussion and standardization and simply limiting dimensions of the rotors and that also facilitates upscaling much better and that's also very helpful for the installation contractors to develop a new ship for projected rotor dimensions in a couple of years and they can use it to install at one wind farm and then build new equipment already for the next generation blades so there's a lot of discussion on standardization that was not my question but one of the trout in there did you also when you were modeling the wake effect did you also model the wake of the pilot self only the rotor do you think that would impact some of your conclusions related to so some of the NES results not my own but in the literature have had that some have had the nacelle and some have not and they have a strong impact very locally but it vanishes between one and two diameters so since wake effects are 20 diameters it was not an important one because in flows we typically I mean you can see a wake up until 40 in the water but that's the case with air but think about it this way so a pole or a foundation doesn't actually take any energy away it's just an obstacle with some drag but a turbine rotor is a marvel that takes that energy away from the flow and so of course behind it there's such a reduction such a difference in the wind speed deficit that compared to what a little pole can do I mean this rotor is sucking energy away so I don't know if that helps Any other questions? Okay then I think I had a question Hi this is Tom from Patrick Mabome I was wondering about the you saw some observational results about the wind wakes from the wind tunnel and so forth that my understanding and most of that is over the land surface so I was wondering how much do you think or to what extent can you just extrapolate that to the marine environment? Yeah and keep in mind also that most yes results are dry so there's no moisture at all so I expect that there would be some some impacts from the fact that there's humidity and maybe even a phase condensation and things like that but the nice thing about using stability as a parameter is that at least some of it should hold some of the results should hold because the atmosphere is stable or unstable of neutral even in moist conditions and so you know there will be differences in the marine environment with moisture but I don't expect that the fundamental processes will be different I just expect that maybe the magnitude will be different my results with the Worf model did include full physics and water vapor you know everything so those were included but not the alias which is what you were asking I think you were asking about the alias I was thinking more of like the surface waves like the affecting the actual shape of the sea servers so you were thinking about whether the waves height could impact these results right yeah not dramatically I would say because to me that converts into a z not surface roughness kind of value and there is not a ton of sensitivity to the results at hub height if you change the surface roughness and hub height is where the maximum deficit is and where everything kind of starts being exciting so I don't expect that to be a large factor it's an educated guess I was going to ask similar questions regarding the interaction at the surface so between heat flux temperatures and any of the physical features you measured all this on land so how does that scale or translate to the water so it was over land but it was basically at a marsh and it was from the ocean let me see if I have a photo yeah so this is where the turbine is and it actually flooded completely because we had a hurricane during one during a week of the simulation so it was very very very most conditions maybe not exactly as offshore but the measurements there's trees and things which no there should be there are some bushes here yeah but you know S1 S2 and S3 which were the ones that we focused on the most wearing a very very fetch-free I mean it was very flat and it was almost flooded I mean I had to wear boots up to here to go it doesn't mean that it extends directly but it wasn't a dry environment just thinking about that with combination of that and the wave action on the water yeah I've seen a couple of papers that showed a large impact of waves in very very special conditions but even that I don't think you would reach I think you maybe would reach like 50 to 60 meters above the ground but never the hub heights that we have today oh no I wasn't thinking so much about the hub heights as the interactions with the surface I don't know normally the trees the trees see it from the inside even if that's the issue okay any other questions I think we'll move on to our last set of presentations I'm sorry but Josh yeah I'm pretty sure I hesitate to ask this because it sounds like a really stupid question but if the turbines have trivial effect on the surface turbulence or speed what's driving these far field effects coming out of the models that's to anybody yeah I mean the effects at hub height are not trivial you see I mean I'm talking about it's measurable but it's it doesn't seem like to be a significant surface so that's why I started my presentation saying that's very important to have enough points to resolve these effects because if you only have one grid point below the rotor you will not get this right the TKE will reach the surface at the next time step just due to the diffusion processes alone basically and so I'm suspicious of many of the modeling results that have been presented before precisely because of this that's my point in addition many that is I've used the version of the WORF model that has a bug in the TKE treatment and so that impacts all the results yeah and then most of the other talks I didn't know how the farm was parameterized I didn't see any details and so I don't know I don't know how that was done so if you for example for TKE if you put the maximum TKE instead of at the top of the rotor you place it at hub height you got a completely wrong result so it's the devil is in the details could you use your microphone please I think it's significant that you show well such small effects both on TKE but also on speed reduction so the u-star which is the parameter we need really so I think that's really important that we I would like to see for example the way we do it because there's stability correction how that translates you were using friends and right how that translates back to you the results here that could be really and I know the results are similar to other researchers I went to a conference last year and there were similar results but there are many who has very different results as we just discussed because this makes nearly it reduces the impact considerably if that's correct as far as I can see so maybe that's the solution to everything use a good parameterization yes that's and it says it saves us the effort to incorporating wind effects but again remember for developers these wake effects are super important for power production so even if we were to find that they're negligible which they're you know they probably are we still need to get them right for power production or we're going to overestimate the farm production big time it's it's obvious maybe as a strong word but we have gone a long way in terms of optimization of the layout and how we treat the wake effects and the optimization models and things like that okay any other comments so that's a good transition to hearing from industry perspective on our committee's task and we have three presentations the first one will be from Ruth Perry and she is head of regulatory affairs for offshore wind Americas at Shell so she joining online or okay can you hear me Callie? yes can you hear me fine can you hear me? yes please some thumbs up and screens good yes we have the slides great thank you everybody first of all I just want to appreciate the committee taking an opportunity to have a developers perspective drawn into your work today just by background I am a fiscal oceanographer myself however have not worked in the Northeast did most of my work in the Gulf of Mexico so but with that said I think very familiar with storm effects hurricanes eddies mesoscale circulates them and some of the topics you've been talking about I will say what we tried to do here is provide you a collective of our perspectives across the oceanography particularly the physics and the biology as well as the climate and some of the things that we have to I'll say reconcile in the work that we do when developing these projects as we're not necessarily scientists but we do have scientists and we do have very capable support such as you heard from the modeling groups that work on the private sector I know AKRFs in the room, DHI and some others and so you'll hear a little bit across some different aspects of this I think a lot you'll hear in my talk is a bit repetitive and I tried to give nod actually to a bunch of people on the committee because obviously you're the experts for a reason and much of your work has informed what we do from our side of the world and encourage open and honest dialogue with some of the things we're going to present and we can also a little bit of what's coming in the future and like I said I'm a physical oceanography myself physical oceanography myself but I'm a data person I'm an observationalist and not a modeler so a lot of what I talk about from the developer perspective is going to come from the observational information we can collect and how that we think is valid to informing opportunities but also informing the regulatory process which your study is going to help us navigate that so I'm going to cover three topics that you see here and go a bit deeper into the physics as well I wanted to start out with kind of the key points where we think the study could really help inform developers through the process and then I'll come a little I'll come back to these at the end but I wanted to put these up front so I think everybody in the room knows this the National Academy's attempts to obtain an authoritative objective and scientifically balance the answers to difficult questions of national importance most people in the room know that the administration has prioritized offshore pretty ambitious target 30 gigawatts by 2030 and 110 gigawatts by 2050 those targets are really policy targets that will ideally result in an energy transformation where we have renewable energy in the domestic portfolio now not to say that is at any means part of the study itself but I think that's where it really underpins the national importance of this issue there is a movement to diversify our energy system particularly utilizing the resources in the offshore to address climate and other challenges that we have at a global scale related to energy in our in our view we hope that the study can provide context that informs regulators on a path forward there is some difficult decisions that have to happen and those decisions in turn in part changes that we may have to make to our projects and so this study is a key component we believe in helping the regulators move forward on a path forward and helping us to determine what makes sense in terms of what these projects should look like how they should develop this study we believe will also inform scientists of better questions to study I think that last conversation with Dr. Archer was a great one as well as many themes throughout the day that we've heard in terms of models and scales of what's being considered in those models and I'll come back to that one and then lastly important developers how to improve our local modeling efforts you heard from the modeling panel that we have to do assessments that are project designed assessments those are intentionally constructed by the US regulatory framework so it's not that we don't want to extend that science beyond what we're looking at but we have very clear mandates and regulatory requirements of what we have to provide to agencies so that they can meet their requirements as regulators we hope that the study can have an appropriate balance that informs future best available science approaches the reason best available science is in quotes here is both a legal regulatory term it's not a term that we would necessarily use in the academic community and again this goes back to that balance of how do regulators move forward these projects and improve these projects and balance the effects of those projects utilizing the information that they have now which is that best available science what we wanted to highlight is a few things that our industry can bring we have to conduct multiple levels of studies assessments and monitoring those range across biology, physics, chemistry and geology geology and geophysics by me I know Doug's in the room as well and so we believe a lot of this data can help to inform how we can answer these difficult questions that the committee will have to reconcile offshore when developers recognize the extension of the value of monitoring research beyond the local project level I'll talk about this in a further slide we do want to be responsible collaborators in this process partly the reason that we're here today as well but we do want to know if you've ever heard me talk on the policy space our regulators are often governed by statutes to assess the impacts of a proposed project those are both localized and cumulative and it has a limit and it certainly has a limit when we look at scientific design and this is not always a perfect system and so how do we balance what's governed regulatory with scientific design that is certainly a challenging problem permitting offshore wind is complex, nonlinear has multiple scales so it's much like ocean physics that's kind of my cheeky piece the table on the right I don't mean for you to read this it's certainly not something we expect to get into the report and all but I just want to point out that the permitting process for these projects is multiple years and over those years the science, the modeling the observations all of that evolves into the best available science that regulators have to use and so that gets incorporated it's certainly non-linear and it's a very complex thing that this study will help to inform is how do we get to an output that makes sense for both the design of the projects and what the projects are designed to address which impacts the climate the inverted triangle I want to point this out I'm going to switch into talking about scales in a few minutes so that everybody's mind that the scales that developers are looking at are very focused on the local and then our neighbors which is the cumulative part under that regulatory context up to the regional parts when we talk about modeling we have to extend that a bit out to look at some of the oceanographic, meteorological and other effects that we have to bring into our assessments okay high level, some of the partnerships just for many of the folks in the room may not be aware what's happening in the U.S. now and I know Laura will dive a little deeper into this with biology we are doing quite a bit of data sharing all of these projects are deploying oceanographic buoys most of those projects are feeding their oceanographic data through the IU's regional systems we intend to see that expand as more buoys are deployed with the new lease areas but also buoys that will be deployed to support the lifetime of these projects which has about a 5-7 year permitting time and then we get into around a 30-35 year operational time and decommissioning and we need those observations not only to support the assessments we're talking about but to support the safety of our operations so the data has utility both supporting the projects the work that the regulators have to do and the scientific community at large we want to honor that the best we can monitoring we have to do what I'll call applied monitoring and this is really looking at the conditions before we build these projects what happens as we're building the project during destruction operations and eventually decommissioning so there is a lot of baseline data collection but also more systematic routine data collection that happens in and around these farms that again generates significant amounts of biological data as well as physics and chemistry that can be brought into government data sources through the regulatory process and lastly part of our good stewardship and where we're operating is we know that there's critical species, critical environments and other ocean uses in those areas so we do understand that you know contributing to the research base understanding what's happening in the systems are important in turn identifying what happens in the systems helps us inform how to build better projects so there is a feedback loop there and many of the developers contribute to a wide variety of research across the spectrum considerations just the last thing I want to go you know before we overview the science from the physical perspectives the current state of hydrodynamics and a regional and local level I added regional and local because you know listening today following the work that the committee is doing we've hit quite heavily on the regional scales and the global scales so it will sound a little repetitive when I give our overview but I think what's really missing is those local scales and I know there's a few of the scientists in the room that we've worked with over the years and what we're seeing from our industry data that we're collecting is the local variability the perturbations and just the dynamics seasonal and annual day today on the shelf where we're operating where these projects are going to be built change pretty significantly so you know we hope to see that the committee address this address those scales and what we know about the current body of science perspective to those scales and that the scales of influence and change are important here as you know we look at European examples and then we look at the technologies evolving in the U.S. both and the turbine technologies but how these wind farms are designed that we comparatively fit development of those individual projects and cumulatively across the mass Rhode Island when energy area into those scales of influence and change as appropriate and ideally I covered this this repeat it you know informs regulators on the path forward that they can be policy objectives inform scientists of better questions to study as there's a significant amount of research that's being kicked off by department of energy know of your ocean energy management among others to continue to study what happens as these projects get built and inform developers how we can improve our local modeling that we feed into the regulatory process so scales matter you'll hear me say that multiple times that is nothing new to the committee so I'm not trying to necessarily offend anybody in the room I think why I hit this very hard is really to focus on that local level and what do we know and not know at the local level in this region that's particularly important to understanding what is happening in the biological system and the pump that's beating that system all the way up to North Atlantic right whales and what is that how does the local context change is it a tipping point you know depending on how many turbines are in the area how those turbines are designed for instance we have a unique case study with mass Rhode Island where all of those leases have a one by one nautical mile grid pattern that's unique in this particular area compared to other areas as we heard earlier the technology in the U.S. is also much different but then again the dynamics in the area is much different as well and so thinking you know global down to local is what's being discussed here today but just want to remind everybody from a developer's perspective we're really looking local up to region on global and so how the two you know directions intertwine we think is a really important component of what the committee can provide to study sponsors based on circulation and currents nothing new here we know if we're talking about a global level that there is a weakening of the Atlantic Merdeal overturning circulation we heard this morning very well strong presentation and data on the warming that's happening at the area how does regional currents and circulation is changing as well as sending warmer currents returning to the Atlantic and warmer waters intruding on the slopes of into Gulf of Maine and the western Shelf region as you see here and what I want to point out when we get down here and my cursor move it in our study area which doesn't look like there is when we get down here we're actually seeing some of that warming too and so overall the bigger global regional picture is really that much of the forcing that's impacting the farms in this location it's coming from the north and it's coming from these and we know the warming is there don't have to repeat that just could have different graphics when we break down into the regional circulation and currents I want to note everybody just follow this little yellow box it's approximate to where the locations in size the Massford Island wind energy areas already speaking as we're looking at this from the developer's perspective at a project level we're trying to put our project in perspective of working upwards in those scales not downwards and so the Shoals is a hydrodynamic system that's part of a larger regional circulation pattern which we know has many changes in it and the regional net flow is expected towards the west southwest of the study area because symmetry has a strong influence on the hydrodynamics you can see the physical features and how all of those interplace as we start to drill down from a science modeling perspective then we know that we have to include these factors and what we're considering is happening in this boxed area from our perspective what we're starting to see in local circulation from our buoys that are in the lease areas and I just want to remind the committee that each lease developer typically one to two buoys in their lease area these buoys are designed to collect information about the lease area and not necessarily much wider than that so usually the placement of those buoys is dependent on the wind resource and what they're trying to assess from the wind resource so again it has a different application that the physics that's coming from that data is very valuable to when we're looking at the area. That data is still preliminary and being worked up and Daniel Mendelssohn who couldn't be here today but I believe we're working with Kelly potentially to bring him in so he can present some of the early data to the committee that you're seeing in the buoys but there are other data that's available on Nieracus from the Equinor project and some of that is in the early stages of the process and so you won't see it today but what I wanted to just cover is that we're seeing consistent patterns to what local studies for the area are showing especially around tides and currents. Tides and the predominant force for driving currents on the surface and the depth of these lease areas. What's interesting about this is that when you compare some of the traditional knowledge from the sailing community or fishing community, they see this as well and we also see the rotary nature of tidal currents in the particular areas where these lease lives are which you can see down at the bottom of this graphic and obviously just going slightly north when you start getting into the channels of this area we have a much different tidal forcing and so what's interesting about this is typically the regional mesoscale models that we've seen will pick that up but when you start getting into the more localized shelf areas you start to lose that resolution. So we're seeing the resolution at the local levels through our buoy data but that tends to get filtered out when we start looking at regional models. This again just shows the dynamics of what's happening in the area and all I wanted to do was point a couple of examples of showing that rotary nature of the currents and just to orient my mouse keeps disappearing Kelly as we're looking at this area up there so as you follow the evolution of it you see that forcing that's coming from the directions that we've heard about all of the off-shelf deeper dynamics especially the models you're picking up but you can see that that rotary nature is pretty persistent on the shelf where these lease areas are. This just shows a zoomed in diagram of that and this essentially is exactly what we're seeing the circular features lower is what we're seeing in our buoy data and we hope to have that available at a time that can help inform the committee's study because it is one of the only sources of localized data that's in this region and I just put the colors up there this model doesn't cover it but you can start to see that same title current rotary trend in the bottom of these figures if you follow it through what a day looks like and then I don't want to spend too much time on this but it was discussed today but we also look at the local hydrodynamics around our particular structures so the types of structures that we're providing in our project design envelopes are what is modeled and so while different developers may look at different technologies there's a pretty consistent overlap in the size of our technologies and we are doing and investigating the same amount of work that's happening as you've heard in the lit review where we're looking at the turbulence and the flow and the changes around our particular structures we're not only looking at this from the physics and the biology of what's in the water column but how the sediment dispersal and then the habitats may be affected as well and I think many of the points around these two slides were raised so I won't read those and the same here in terms of what happens when you have a stratified system and looking at the overall effect when we look at a range of impact and that's what I really want to highlight here is when we're looking at specifically individual projects but then looking humanically at a local level particularly across the wind energy area that bone is designated we know that we're going to have the turbulent flow we're going to have these changes on our individual turbines but what is that kind of tipping balance of the impact against a broader ecosystem that is more forced by what's happening globally and regionally than what is happening at a local level so we're trying to reconcile that as well through quite a bit of our monitoring and research but we want to be partners in doing that with the scientific community as well how can we collect the data and observations to really understand what that change in the system is but based on the literature review and the comparative analysis to the technology that we're deploying we believe that there's an overall minor impact at a project local level when you look at effects on hydrodynamics so I'll leave this back up as the closing just to kind of come back to what we hope the study can do and really provide further insight on how we can improve the local modeling efforts how the study can help define what we know in terms of best level science and when I say the lead talking about the collective developer community, the academic community and government community as well as other ocean users of the area like I highlighted the sailing community for instance that knows what happens out at a local level where we can really understand is what happening at a local level cumulatively going to impact what's happening at a regional level where we know that the regional courses that you've heard about today are really potentially more impactful to the biology as well as some of the global changes that are happening potentially more impactful to the biology than the structure themselves so we are trying to reconcile that question as well we want to be partners and moving that forward and we look forward to what the committee can help provide to the community aware the current state of knowledge and sciences on that particular topic hey thank you questions we're happy to take questions all at the end too Eileen if that's helpful to hear from others okay if there's no questions right now maybe make sure I don't miss anybody okay that's fine we can hold questions until we get to the end if we want to do that okay so next we're going to hear from Kaplan he is the North American director of external affairs for ocean winds which is a global offshore wind joint venture between EDP renewables and energy and overseeing governmental and regulatory policy so Seth please go ahead thank you turning on the microphone is very helpful so let me just toss this up and start my video and kick it into slide show mode there we go thank you very much and I'm a who you want speaking towards the end in that I'm going to be brief and really trying to be responsive to what's been said more than sort of presenting fresh material I mean I do have to say that initially that having a first presentation hitting on some of the day hitting on some of the same points that I intended to about the question of putting things into context in terms of the climate impact better than I could have presented it sort of was a bracing and very positive experience in general so my context for what I'm going to be talking about here is that I spent 16 years at conservation law foundation run and eventually running clean energy and climate change there started off working more on the transportation and land use side moving into energy and climate I would say climate on the label so you know and collaborating with the oceans program there on ocean protection and my goal here is indeed to kind of put things into context and talk about the big picture and tie it back to some of the excellent points that have been presented here you know listen there are obviously enormous topics of great importance that require lots of further study and the purpose of this panel is indeed to dig into one of them and what we need to do is be very clear about what science what the regulators need to do and they need good input and perspective from the scientific community is what science is ready for use in decision making and what science needs to progress further before it can be used in the decision making process what do we know and what we don't know and I was deeply heartened that that was sort of a theme of so many of the slides from so many of the presenters what we need to know what we don't know yet and that's a humility that is rare in our society these days and I think it's a perspective for the scientific community that is greatly admirable you know my perspective is somebody who worked, who has spent my career as an environmental advocate and then working in renewable energy and basically viewing it as implementing science you know I spent 10 years of my life coal-fired power plants in New England and they're gone and I'm still here so I guess I won but you know when I think about the plant at Brayton Point which used to when it was running full tilt put about a million gallons of heated water into Mount Hope Bay every day which is a body of water consisting of about 30 million gallons you know it is not surprising that there was this impact on the fish population there which is very well documented by some great folks at Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management one thing I would note is that I heard an echo of that this morning frankly the discussion of the blue fish being in the wrong place at the wrong time the company that operated the Brayton Point power plant used to have a very successful fishing derby because all sorts of exotic species could be found around the thermal outfalls from that power plant and understanding that these projects and we need to understand what are the context and what is the impact of our projects and you know we are not discharging you know wind farms do not discharge heated water but of course we need to be mindful of our impacts both positive and negative now of course the ultimate example of something we know a lot about is climate you know I just can't help but note that you know very few people remember Eunice who in 1856 published what is believed to be probably the first scientific note about what we would now regard as climate science and you know and I mean I think it's actually a really interesting thing for from an academic perspective to go back and look at what John Tyndall wrote shortly thereafter or Spente Arrhenius wrote in 1896 a lot of the hypotheses a lot of the thought about you know that this there's the foundation upon which climate science rest is about the most solid thing in the world and we have the IPCC reports are in fact the largest peer-reviewed scientific exercise in the history of humanity and I think it's always important to acknowledge Charlie Keeling you know missing his children's birthdays as he relentlessly maintained the CO2 observations on the top of Manila that give us the history of that underlie and the data observations I mean all that we can hope to do as offshore wind developers in terms of this community is to be as good a partner as Keeling had in terms of helping to provide you with the data that you need since we are going to be present out there you know so I know it's a little you know cheesy but that's who we want to be we want to be cognizant of your work we want to be helpful in your work we want to provide you with the data that you need and you know I know that it is a little bit of a mildly extreme point to point out but the difference between this body of science that goes back to the mid-1800s and you know the emerging science really important stuff that you guys are working on is as sharp and obviously where the two things interconnect is in the science about the impacts of global warming on marine mammals you know that this is a very important topic and we need to be very aware of how what role we can play as an ocean user in terms of helping you all to get your arms around that and understands and have that play out in the conservation world my takeaway here and this is where my shred of hope is you know I spent the last 20 odd years engaged mostly in New England and then getting into New York and into the rest of you know in a little bit in Quebec and then the rest of the North America about during that time the energy transition we've already had is pretty remarkable that we used to run on coal in New England as is still the case in some other parts of the United States and now we are on a day-to-day basis generally running overwhelmingly a plurality on natural gas this is a transition that has occurred and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts now I mean this is a very important point that these mandates about offshore wind are not we call them policy mandates but they are driven by the science that you know I got the citation down there to a really excellent piece in climate that was used by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in formulating the 2050 climate roadmap to be very blunt here on the coasts there are just not a lot of places we can use to make renewable energy to make zero emissions power and what we have is the offshore wind resource as somebody who has spent a couple of decades for example trying to help build wind farms in Maine the transmission issues there and some of the issues that have prevented that from happening are a stark reminder that there are very very few places here on the heavily populated coasts of our country where we can build large scale onshore wind we are putting up a fair amount of solar we need to put up more we need to put a lot more but there is increasing resistance and issues you know some legitimate about displacement of agricultural land and such and there is a limited amount of how much we can import there is a reason why the little blue slice for imports is blue because that's hydro kebek and there is a limited amount of clean imports that we can't from other sources because everybody is going to need a lot of clean power we need this we absolutely need this and I would highlight what I have on the right there about demand that we need to roughly double our electric use as we convert our homes and offices and factories from direct burning of fossil fuels to electricity as we switch our transportation sector over to electric the demand is going to rise and we need to be smart about it the little gray area up at the top of that bar is conversion loads those are flexible industrial loads many of which don't exist right now but what we need to do is to be able to have highly flexible use of electricity that can ramp up and down depending on when we have need but at the end of the day in order to reach our climate goals that are an output from that rigorous scientific enterprise that has been in progress since 1896 or so in order to meet our goals we need an enormous quantity of clean zero emissions generation and the resource we have here on the coast is overwhelmingly offshore wind and we can't stint on it we need on that as we hit the scales we need to put on one side of the equation the absolute critical environmental need societal need resource protection need species protection need protection need to actually build these things that has to be part of the equation so that's my plea not to get a little over the top there but one reality that people just don't are unfortunately not aware of you know it's a the band talking heads once said it's we live in the age of the dinosaurs because we run on gasoline and in New England and in most of the northeast on the cold nights of the year and the cold days of the year we burn oil to keep the lights on and it's a high carbon fuel and that is a reality we need to avoid those high carbon moments when we are putting particulate matter and other things into the air during the burning of that those fuels we need the resources that are available during that time to kick in and as many of you are extremely well aware it's really windy offshore during those cold times in the winter time so the one of the express purposes of the offshore wind mandates that the northeastern states have adopted is because offshore wind is a winter peak coincident resource that can help us address this critical critical problem so I know this is not the usual stuff of a presentation at a committee like this but I felt it was very important to say what I could say that would have some value and so I put up there the future which is a floating offshore wind turbine which is currently in commercial operation off of Portugal and we'll make an offer to accept any floated questions after Laura has spoken okay thank you about provoking comments okay so I think we'll go to our final presentation here from Laura Morris here and she's just recently joined Inventor Energy where she's the director of environmental compliance and committing for east coast offshore wind projects thank you hi everyone I want to thank the Academy and the committee for inviting us today to speak it's a pleasure to be here and it's been quite a learning curve today and really enjoyed the presentations so my name is Laura Morris I recently joined Inventor Energy actually on Tuesday and a little bit about Inventor Energy for folks who may not be familiar with Inventor Energy they are a world leading renewable energy company they've developed over 30 gigawatts of renewable energy through 200 projects and there's significantly more in the pipeline we as a company have secured two offshore wind lease areas one on the east coast and it's a you may have heard of leading light wind which is in the mid-Atlantic Byte and then a lease area on the west coast and more obey so a bit about myself some of the folks here know me well but I for those that don't I'm actually marine mammal biologists by training and spent several decades working for NOAA and other organizations supporting stock assessment surveys and various directed marine mammal surveys throughout U.S. and U.S. waters and internationally and spent a good 10 years doing aerial and shipboard surveys for North Atlantic right whales and I remember the one year when there actually was zero calves that we sighted down in the southeast and that was probably sad to say almost 20 years ago so right whales certainly have I've seen them go through a lot of change as all biologists have been studying the species and 2012 I joined the energy industry at first with Shell and then shifted to Orsted work since and I've been in the offshore wind industry since 2017 and supporting multiple projects that are in development including South Forkwin which is actually approaching build in the next month or so I've been heavily involved in advancing data sharing agreements between the between industry and NOAA and other federal agencies tearing off some of the work that Shell did when I actually was working at Shell and Ruth has discussed and have been involved initiating quite a few million dollars in marine research including EcoPan project that was involved Rutgers and several other institutions I sit on a several research advisory committees including the RWSE and the main offshore wind research committee and many developers are heavily involved in these organizations and so as Seth and Ruth has have indicated you know we take our stewardship quite seriously I think it's worthwhile to highlight some of the investment that the offshore wind industry has made today in right whale research this is an estimate of investment is likely a much larger number and then if you consider investment in the larger marine science field we're probably talking a number that's already in access of 100 million dollars across the offshore wind industry it's pretty significant and this number will continue to grow there's a range of studies that we have voluntarily funded today and then there's additional studies that Ruth has talked about and we'd be happy to take questions on any of this in the Q&A period and I think there's been some questions about data sharing and I think there's this sense that there isn't data being shared by offshore wind but there certainly is and I think it's just there's so much happening so quickly that it's hard to identify where those data are and we're happy to try and steer you to where some of that information is this can't be done alone and we have been building as an industry collaborations with many institutions we have seen the formation of two really key organizations the regional wildlife science collaborative as well as the responsible offshore science alliance which respectively deal with wildlife and fishery science as well as oceanographic and other marine science topics and they work quite collaboratively and developers are heavily involved with that we are seeing significant state investments that we haven't listed but there's millions of dollars that the states themselves are investing in directed research that probably many of you are familiar with or have benefited from and of course you're seeing a significant range of academic institutions that are becoming involved or have been involved in directed research and we certainly expect to see this list grow this is by no means a comprehensive list so for the task at hand one of the tasks that you're tackling is to evaluate the potential of the perturbations from VTGs wind turbine generators to potentially change ecosystem dynamics and how those could affect North Atlantic right well pre-availability near Nantucket shoals so the next few slides is nothing new I don't profess to be an expert on this I'm a biologist I'm a mammal field biologist but you know this is just a refresh of what you have already talked about quite extensively today but just revisiting some of these things so obviously as we think about it as developers we recognize it's a very complex biological and hydrodynamic system that we're trying to tease out and as Ruth very well explained that we're trying to look as well at the local level for our permits and regulatory processes that we're going through I'm not going to go into detail because obviously you're all well familiar with this information already this is just a slide you'll get this slide pack South Coast wind was kind enough to share some slides that their team is putting together and I think this is just a nice simple model of what leads to successful foraging conditions for North Atlantic right whales and you can look at it more closely when you get the slides very simple flow chart on the process but I think very handy as well and then same here this is just a conceptual model of the annual cycle of copepods and as you're advancing the report I think it's a way to think about how is impacts from the wind farm leading to potential impacts to this cycle of copepods and aggregation on Nantucket shoals from our understanding and our review of the literature to date and the best available science is that there is infection onto the Nantucket shoals which seems to be driven primarily from regional currents and tides and that climate change has been well described today has may have a significant effect on the regional circulation and current systems and what we ask is that as you're progressing the report is to understand the strength of the relative forces of the existing area specific conditions and stressors that you've been describing versus any stressor that may result from a wind farm that you also have talked in brief about today I want to take a higher level review and I really want to call out Erin because I find the work that Erin or co-authors have done has been really seminal work really important to right well conservation and really highlighting what's happening to the populations over the last several decades I personally have witnessed it in my years of doing right well work seeing that shift of right well from the Bay of Fundy up until the Gulf of St. Lawrence and I remember 2017 very clearly when all those deaths started rolling in because right well suddenly showed up in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and it was a really seminal summer for biologists studying right wells because there was no, there didn't seem to be a way to stop it but Canada has definitely responded but I think the work that's done here to me really drives home that there are larger forces at play affecting the right well population and I hope as you're progressing the report that you can consider these and of course Erin obviously is here on the committee and can elaborate in detail about the great work that her and her co-authors have done so other considerations now I understand that your focus is really on hydrodynamics and not on these larger considerations but I think it's relevant to point it out and there are elephants in the room we can't ignore these aspects about the population and the primary currently the primary sources of mortality direct mortality for North Atlantic right wells is entanglements and vessel strikes we can't ignore that and we're seeing as discussed a little bit today there are newly identified aggregations that are being detected some from and they may have been existing aggregations but they're maybe newly identified because of the work that's being done by by Oshawaen funded research some of those as a winter detection from the EcoPan project that that Josh can talk about in more detail in your closed sessions and of course we talked earlier this morning about the aggregation the spring aggregation just last month off of near the New York shipping channel which is very interesting and of course we all know that there was the recent shift into the Gulf of St. Lawrence in the late 2000 teens and so what is the relative importance of these areas and that leads to thoughts about the population consequence of disturbance models and you have Doug on the committee who can who has been heavily involved over the years in advancing these models and I think it's really important to consider this because ultimately I think the the question that that Boehm is looking at is does perturbations at the local level to Nansuk it shows ultimately affect population that's not the question you're here to answer but I do think it's something to think about and I did want to highlight that we do do feel that we're bringing conservation benefit to the species offshore wind industries being conservation benefit to the species there's a lot of things that we are doing and can do to benefit including reducing entanglements through supporting the fishing industry to shift to ropeless technology this isn't happening I will tell you but it's a real opportunity for the industries to work together and and really bring some direct benefit to the population but what we are doing is a significant investment and addressing vessel strike risk through advancing a real-time listening network that frankly wasn't there there there was maybe one or two buoys and now we have a chain of buoys along the eastern seaboard largely funded by offshore wind developers and we're advancing tools for detection automated real-time detection and developing sighting sharing which is important to help mitigate for direct impacts from offshore users of all industries when they're out at sea of course we've had Seth went into detail about climate change and why the renewable energy transition is happening so I need not say more about that but it is really important for us to get these wind farms built so we can at least try to abate the rate of climate change and then as Ruth detailed we are advancing a lot of good science and then offshore wind industry is going to continue to trigger millions of dollars in research investments including bringing you all together to have this deep dive I mean this is very exciting to see it as a real benefit and ultimately a benefit to the right male population so finally I leave you with these thoughts and our request to the committee as you are advancing their report and I think these are things you're already going to do but I did want to reiterate these is to please consider inter-annual variability in the ecosystem the influence of storm events and of course their potential increasing strengths where there is some indication as you described Glenn earlier today and of course the influence of climate change which of course Glenn described in detail this morning and then a consideration of the relative contribution of all the feeding areas that right whales are visiting and what that energy intake means to the population and the population's breeding success I think as you heard I was sort of trying to dig into a little bit about the different energetic value of the different species of copepods and I think that's a very important point to consider and your recommendations will absolutely help the industry and all the stakeholders RWSC, ROSA, the states federal agencies and prioritizing and targeting funding for future officer when related research it's going to be a really key and valuable output from the report and so I'm really excited to see that to consider for my company where we want to steer funding in the future and as developers we're committed to this process as Ruth really eloquently described we want to advance best available science we support science based decision making including this group and contributing as best we can to your efforts and we commit to retaining a focus on sustainability principles and our stewardship of the environment that we operate in so I want to thank everyone for listening I hope this offers some value to your efforts and thank you for your time and I think we're now ready to take any questions from you all. Yeah great thank you. Questions for any of the three speakers we just heard? Comments? Yes. I guess I had a question for Seth it's about you know you showed these plans for 2050 looking quite far into the future and offshore wind was a big part of the renewable strategy there do you have an idea of say current turbine capacities what that would mean for the area in terms of area on the shelf occupied by offshore wind farms or yeah I mean I think there I mean obviously there is modeling behind that that anticipates a significant amount of floating particularly it would be in the Gulf of Maine and then further down the mid-Atlantic and potentially even further out into the New York Bight beyond the New York Bight yeah I don't know the numbers off the head and quite honestly floating is progressing at an extremely rapid rate in terms of the you know that traversing that same curve in terms of going from you know in terms of the height and the number of megawatts produced so it's a pretty speculative business to be able to get into that I mean obviously when you start getting beyond you know 2035 2040 you're getting extremely speculative but yeah and you do you will start thinking about as we're happening is happening on the land side about repowering I mean some of those earlier Danish projects that were referred to earlier about horns revs I mean and so I mean when those first to offer some of our colleagues know better than I do they were put out there with basically land based turbines and within about six months they had just rusted up and seized and it's only been in the last 24 years that the entire process of learning how to make an offshore turbine it's something that can survive offshore as happened so as is happening on the land side we can expect it'll happen a lot slower than what's happened with those early Danish projects where they some of those have been repowered now five times some of the very early ones five six times but eventually you know as we get 20 years live in 20 years after the initial building of these 20 30 years it's reasonable to expect repowering with more powerful turbines Dr. Archer can lecture us all if she wants about the debt's limit and the mathematical ceiling on how much power you can extract from the air but it's hard to get there so I don't have the number for the turbines but yeah and also to be very honest when you start getting beyond like 2040 2045 a bunch of speculative other renewable technologies that could step into the breach you know I think we need to build plans today based upon what we know is possible and this is what we know is possible I can add with regards to development in the US and Mary may want to speak to this but there are several lease areas being considered I'm not lease areas I'm sorry considered for development in the New York Bight along the west coast in Gulf of Mexico and west coast Maine California or Oregon so there's a lot in the pipeline for that they can elaborate on to the committee with regards to innovation and where how big turbines turbines are going to get I was at a conference last week talking with some experts in this and they've heard numbers as big as 60 gigawatts I was shocked I thought it was in the 20 to 25 range you know but 60 gigawatts is now being discussed so it's amazing 60 to 60 megawatts just a 60 megawatt turbine I'm sorry megawatt I'm sorry megawatt apologies but and one final thing in Europe there is pretty aggressive gigawatt targets I think it's 300 now that's what they recently said one thing I can say is that I try not to repeat numbers without them having in front of me but one thing I can say is that when you look at the industry forecasts going out to like 2040 2045 half more than half of the of the gigawatts or megawatts are floating right now we have no floating in here and we don't have any in the golden state wind our project out in California and the leaks area that you folks have out there is we just got the lease we're moving forward with it but that's going to be a number of years till there is that's going to be a couple of generations behind the fixed bottom projects that are under discussion here but that's the world we're talking about is that where the norm will become floating I think we have to a U.S. contact so if we just consider I think about 17 projects I kind of see Mary behind there I can add them up let's just say 15 to 17 they can get about an average of two gigawatts with the current state of technology based on what NREL and BOEM have calculated that of course has some variability across the projects and technology like Laura said and Seth said but if you assume 17 projects two gigawatts right we're only at 34 gigawatts if we're talking about that 50 gigawatts target you know if we're taking best available science that's here today but I think the other thing to recognize too is that may be what we want to build but that may not be what comes out of the regulatory process right so there is currently not full lease utilization just given micro siting challenges and some of the other things that that we raise whether that species habitats ocean use or just technical constraints water depth sediment etc right so all of those balances you can assume that there's not any variation which keeps us under under some of those policy targets that we're talking about and like Seth said when you get into floating technology or you consider regional nuances whether you're in California or Gulf of Mexico for instance in terms of things we have to consider as we move away from the best available wind resource areas like we have in the northeast in California when we get to Gulf of Mexico we don't have great winds and so the technology has to change to utilize wind yields that may not be optimal where we have it in certain areas of U.S. Yeah and to pick up a specific what Ruth was just talking about in terms of not full lease utilization the decision to go with the one nautical mile by one nautical mile uniform grid in the Massachusetts wind energy area from a energy production standpoint was not optimal but it was what was done in order to address a critical stakeholder issue. I spent my time between CLF and offshore wind working for an onshore wind company that has an extremely large wind farm that you will have driven through if you've ever driven between Indianapolis and Chicago and that has a uniform layout to address the concerns of that community and we've done that in the renewables industry to address these local challenges compromises in order to address local conditions and that reduces the amount of power you can produce there. I mean I would just simply note that the areas that have been flagged for concern by some within the area that is being under discussion here we're talking about swaths of space on that matrix of dots of where the turbines would go in the Massachusetts area we're talking that have been identified by some as of concern we're talking 40-50 turbines and taking those out would make projects uneconomically viable and take a real bite out of the climate benefits of these projects so it's absolutely critical that the work of a body like this and the committee like this really help inform the regulators to make decisions based on as Ruth said the best available science and which is more of a legal standard than an academic one I understand and really helping them to meet the legal standards about taking a hard look at impacts but again looking at the overall net environmental impact and understanding that there are trade-offs you know and it's not commercial trade-offs it's environmental trade-offs for shrinking projects in response to you know concerns that have been expressed yeah thanks Eileen great to have the developers here I think it's really good to keep the discussion well rounded I have two things one is with respect to what Christina presented and maybe this isn't necessary but is there any need to have data from the development side and the industrial production side in terms of the cascading effects throughout the wind farm to help us think about what that does to the surface of the ocean or do we have everything we need just thinking about data that the industry could provide that could help us either recommend modeling that or actually you know developing that into what we do do we need more data Doug you're asking a data oceanographer so if I'm putting my science hat on the answer is yes and I think there are opportunities to collect that data through the regional entities that science entities that have been stood up that the developers academic community and NGO community are part of one is focused on environment marine species minus fish and the other one is focused on fish and along with the IU's associations who are really helping as well as NROP, Mako, Marko the regional ocean planning bodies is trying to figure out what does that look like there's been a lot of work from the passive acoustic side as you're aware to try to figure out there's going to be passive acoustic monitoring so how do we do the power analysis to make it meaningful passive acoustics information right so that we're not just collecting data for the sake of data we haven't really encroached that around the physics and I think there's a huge opportunity there because as we are developing the projects on our side the engineers are going to be collecting data to look at the structures themselves there's opportunity to figure out what are those data packages that we can integrate into the structures themselves or near and around the structures including turbulence monitoring but no one has sat down I think or brought together the right group to say what are those data systems what are those packages how do we use Turbine's platform of opportunity and do the statistical analysis to support how much data we need to collect right because when we talk about okay Doug wants to put it oxygen sensors just throwing something out there or CTD's or whatever on 147 turbines all of the Turbine's proposed in the south coast area that's bit hard to do but that may not make scientific sense right and so we have to sit down and look at the Turbine's platform of opportunities where they're located and how we can utilize those structures to collect the data that then in turn can answer the questions so a bit of a stepwise process there but I think I could speak at least from the three developers on the panel today we're pretty amenable to doing that we've certainly been pushing and supporting the entities to help us do that yeah thanks Ruth my apologies I didn't really explain that very well what I was really interested in was the physics data and the turbulence data the you know the data associated with the actual power generation and what that does to the downwind effects potential downwind effects on the oceanography sorry I didn't it's a good question I'm going to have to put my developer hat back on yes but some of that data impacts the commercial sensitivity of the optimization of our equipment so I'll say similar to LiDAR data so when we're talking about wind speed data on the buoys four meters above surface standard and maneuver data not a problem but when we talk about the LiDAR data looking at the wind resource profile all the way up through the structures and the atmospheric column that is proprietary because that information is supporting our calculations of optimization and power delivery that then informs commercial applications like this so I think the answer is yes and we can get to what that looks like in terms of how do we manage confidentiality to share that data with the academic community if we start those conversations now bringing in the engineering side it's good you know data sharing takes quite a bit to work through Laura and I personally know this for many of our efforts but I think it's yes I'll just say that yes but there's some commercial sensitivity with doing it right away and the conversation to have with Block Island and C-Val as well we do have structures out right so we can start collecting localized data and build out test the application the data sharing test it out before we get to commercial scale in the water yeah and part of it it should have been maybe I should have phrased it even differently again and that is are there data from Europe that could be used brought to bear on this question of what does that look like halfway through the wind farm and then beyond and then downstream I guess that's a different question and as you're going through the next few months advancing the report if you come up with a question or request for data then developers can take it back and see if they can get it there's no guarantees but that is all we can do is take what you're requesting and carry that forward but again I want to highlight what you all put in and recommendations in the end of this report for data gaps is really critical I mean we're going to look really closely at this to identify funding for voluntary funding the states will be looking at it and how we collect data to fill in the gaps for future projects I think the results the report will be really valuable and I know we've had I've had a lot of conversations through Naracush and about this topic when I was at Orsett for five years everybody wanted data as Ruth suggested people mentioned people want to put sensor everything and that's not reasonable nor really achievable you know ultimately it's really we talked about this last week it's really hard to get access to those turbines because of liability and there's just not comfortable engineers are just not comfortable their energy generating devices are critical to our energy infrastructure and there's going to be sensitivities there but that doesn't mean there isn't desire to find ways to collect data that's a value and I think the wind farms personally I think the wind farms can contribute significantly to advancing climate models weather forecasting models obviously other environmental impact assessments but I think we have to think really carefully and strategically as Ruth just described doing an analysis to figure out what sensors are needed how many are needed and you know what is that what does that study look like and I think we should think about that I agree with what Ruth just suggested Eileen I had one other thing if I can and that is I assume the answer to this is no but if they're with the development of paired technology like hydrogen producing on wind turbines which I know is being contemplated does that change what we're trying to do at all and the answer is probably no but I just wanted to as long as we have the developers here because that's going to change what's happening on the platforms and things like that I'm not sure if that's a question for us I don't know Ruth I'm not sure what you're asking I don't think anybody has actually gotten to the design phase in terms of that I mean just the wrong guess would be that I think that we should approach the question about nacelles and towers having an impact on the modeling of wake probably figures into this that like a great bulbous shape on the side of the thing to you're the expert on the side of it to help convert to hydrogen theoretically probably let me put a plug in there is a turbine which is a research entity that's looking at blade technologies for hurricane and typhoon standards Gulfwood technology shameless plug shell is the corporate partner developer partner into that they're out of Louisiana Doug they are working with a couple entities and Department of Energy and so you know sensor testing and validation before we go to the field I think there are some emerging opportunities to do that because there are similar discussions of looking around instrumentation that's going to monitor fatigue and etc right so again think it's a possibility there's it's probably early initial conversations that start happening now and I can provide I'll send Kelly a link if that's something that the committee would like to maybe identify is where these existing opportunities might lie to do testing for new data collection right that's specific for looking at local us installations okay as a future future endeavor great thanks thanks Ali thank you any other comments questions yes Erin and then Josh thank you yeah I just wanted to commend the industry speakers in Yorick for being really upfront about the potential positive benefits of the work that the wind industry wants to do I took a little break from the east coast in Wales and did some work with gas platforms off the coast of California and impacts of decommissioning and one of the things that we found is all of that structure in the water created really important habitat for threatened and commercial commercially valuable rockfish species so overall you know the net environmental impacts were complex but this was a very clear benefit I think that Laura brought up some really important points about ways that this can be positive including expanding the listening network fantastic to help along the transition to hopeless gear and you know my work is really showing that right whales and climate change is a bad mix obviously wind is not an instant solution for that but you know it's something that we have to think about so I'm just I'm excited for this committee to move forward with recommendations both to mitigate the negative impacts but also to really seriously consider this opportunity to benefit the ecosystem and right whales specifically so thank you for that direction I really appreciate that I just want to add to your California example and Milton Love's work is this is classic tried and true in the Gulf of Mexico as well and a long history of fishermen being partners in the data collection right and actually doing the monitoring and information to support attraction versus production right and you can argue that there's positive neutral and negative benefits of both but you know if they're not necessarily in conflict and you get both there's potential value there and I think you're exactly right but the conversation always tends to always go negative and I think that's one of the things that you're seeing with the US developers we want to be partners in the science monitoring and research early is we know and understand that there could be negative impacts or effects but there also may be neutral or even positive impacts and effects and those are going to evolve over the timeline of these installations so we want to do we want the information that either were required to do for regulatory standard or that we want to do to be part of the community and we want to help you and benefit when we have this conversation so I really appreciate those comments and just wanted to add I've been up to my head in that debate for a long time with fisheries in the Gulf of Mexico and offshore platforms and even moving far out a good example with the oil and gas community in that sense is we were in areas that the regulators and the resource managers provide the information and utilize fishermen who go out there 80-100 miles offshore to bring that assemblage of information in to look at a very complex problem when you were talking about impacts and effects and I just like to add that we have a really grand opportunity here I put up some dollar figures this will be the biggest infusion of dollars for scientific research on the East Coast has probably ever seen and this will occur again in the Gulf and again on the West Coast maybe the Navy's invested more but it's huge it's a huge opportunity and I don't want to see it wasted and when I worked for Shell in Alaska we saw this rapid uptick and there was a lot of poor use of dollars and I think there's been myopic focus on particular things like developing a past acoustic monitoring network and no discussion about oceanographic sampling and we're developing an industry to respond to climate change how can we ignore that so again I really look forward to your recommendations to help steer the industry to broader sampling that will optimize the significant influx of dollars that's encouraging you have a response to this or I didn't want to follow up on Aaron's comment I wanted to say something very similar I just wanted to follow up on Aaron's comment because I wanted to say something very similar as one of my last recommendations was I just didn't have the sensitivity about the data sharing there and I was really I certainly learned something very positive that there is a positive attitude towards sharing that subsurface oceanographic data and I just appreciate all three talks because I want to take them back to my students this summer and understanding this larger scale context with offshore wind we tend to look at it in the narrow sense of the problems but I certainly want to show those slides if they're shared with non-committing members to our informal seminar in the summer because I think it's important for students in particular to see this larger context a lot of times they're mostly reading newspaper articles which are not always the most balanced approaches to problems there but no I just want to appreciate your perspectives on this. Thank you and we're happy to talk to your students there's an old expression in project development never miss your flight home is the true bottom line so I may quietly slip away here Doug knows this well he's always been a policy class and come in and given talks I think Lauren I've done this quite a bit on the nexus between regulation policy and how industry is kind of in the middle right balancing all of those things as well as folks in the room from the agency side so happy to do it and I think we often get caught within the tags that follow our names and so what Laura said huge influx of dollars it shouldn't matter where those dollars are coming from it should be it should matter how wisely we spend that to do the science to learn about more information because you know in the Gulf of Mexico no matter how the dollars have come we have all the dollars in the world and we still can't answer all the questions and so it doesn't matter necessarily how many dollars are there but how we use the dollars to move along these big big investments whether it's to address climate and we require new infrastructure or it's to look at improving seafood sustainability which is the battle going on with aquaculture in natural resource right so there's a lot of good analogies but yeah we're happy to come on a traveling road show that's helpful thank you we've been waiting let him make recommendations Ruth I hear between the lines you also you're looking maybe for a more efficient consenting process so to avoid this 10 year timescale or something in Europe we identify that's the bottleneck now that's the consenting so what we do is pushing to get kind of community consenting parts of the process in Holland we have data collected from all the developers so you can basically just tap into that database we do it with environmental stuff also collecting data in big public databases so you avoid all this say individual for each developer to do the repeat that process on and on again and I think maybe that could also what we do here that could be start of it comment we brought in experts that have been managing those data sets most of the information we have to do has to be turned in has to go to the regulators first there's usually time crunches and other challenges there however since I'm not in the room Bo Minoa colleagues can't layer at me but we have been working with Bo Minoa who both have extensive science and data management sides right if you talk about all of the survey data we're collecting for instance the geophysical data it's huge huge data sets right so it's all quality control to the highest levels to government standards to industry standards international standards but there's no capacity on the data management side for the government to serve that to the public and so that is a different conversation but we can't stop unfortunately from our perspective the regulatory process to solve that so we try to work with our government entities who can solve that Bo Minoa IU's National Center for Environmental Intelligence and others but it's been a systemic issue in the U.S. where they haven't gotten research for operational funding to maintain data management systems to intake all of this data so what's been done in Europe is a really novel approach and essentially setting it up in the bidding process and requiring the sustained funding source we don't have that in the U.S. and we're kind of often putting the piece that together when I say we it's all the groups the developers are certainly at the table because we would rather have our data go and be utilized than sit on the on bone shell and come out much later in the regulatory process but it's hard for us to balance how to do all of that while we're also you know in need deep in a very complicated regulatory process that we have to move along to get the projects built so we try to do it all but we fortunately require some resources even on our side but government as well to get that over the over the line in the U.S. Thank you Chen you want to last comment? Okay yeah I know so I feel like you know to follow the comments you know I think it's a shorting data for them in the industry really important so we work in the industry so they have to sign the contract so no we've developed the wind model develop the wind model they have a powerful offshore wind New York Harbor so we did a three months of simulation in the forecast they compare very good for their observation but we're not allowed to show people so the data are not open so then your other model are not able to use data to validate the model so even we have a you know wind resolving model with comparison but comparison coming very good but we're not allowed to show because we signed agreement you're not allowed to open anything for public without the permission for company that's why I think the shorting data for industry really help you know model development right Yeah I mean to be honest it's always a gut instinct for industries it's you know when they invest dollars in anything it's the gut instinct to hold on to it it's it's it's just what industries do but you know we are actively as offshore wind industry many of us are working to change that and I think as companies you know companies are changing as well but we have other organizations and I you know we are for many years in the start of offshore wind industry we were in the position of having to do the funding and then all those questions come up internally where all those processes and standards happen and then what's happening with the data but we didn't have an RWSE or ROSA and other organizations to push funds through where that does no longer is an issue the money goes in and then it's and then the work is done so so I you know it will continue to be a strategic of of concern and I think there are going to be data that is sensitive like hub height data that will have to work through as an industry to find ways to leverage that data but ensure that each developer is protected we make it sound optimal and perfect like Laura said but you know really she and I in a lot of the physics and biological data and it takes years kind of break down some of those silos but committees like this I know the ocean study board has taken this on as well government is trying to work it out and support industry and how we can do it but it's it's not perfect and like Laura said there's a lot of considerations and and there's you know honestly there's been a lot of instances to where industry has been burned putting data out or it comes with the perception that it's industry data so it is not good and it shows only what industry wants so there is a push and pull that's created that kind of knee jerk reaction that Laura speaks to that initial knee jerk reaction because there is a push and pull where we deal with a lot of perception bias with the work and contribution that we do and the people that we fund to help support us but there is a lot of data though that is being shared so Ruth highlighted some of the south coast and I believe Atlantic shores but anyways there are there are some yeah there's some oceanographic data yet when I was at worst at all the eco-pam data it was already fed into to know and and all the acoustic data real-time acoustic data is made available so there's a lot of studies that actually it's actually sitting with the researchers themselves and you know it's up to them to disseminate the data after they you know finish their research. Okay this is a wonderful discussion and it could probably go on for another couple of hours but in the interest of time I think we'll have closed the meeting for today and before I do that I want to thank everyone for the participation the wonderful presentations thank our online audience for hanging in there and for their questions and participation as well also I'd like to thank Kelly and Safa for organizing this very good workshop for meeting today so thank you all and I'm sure as a committee begins to write its report or continues writing the report we'll be coming back to all of you with probably questions and ask for additional input so thank you all very much it was the most flawless meeting ever the organization was great the zoom worked this was like unbelievable


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