Hello and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to our briefing today about offshore wind energy. I'm Dan Brissette, Executive Director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, coming to you today from the eastern shore of Lake Champlain in Swanton, Vermont. Environmental and Energy Study Institute was founded in 1984 on a bipartisan basis by members of Congress to provide science-based information about environmental energy and climate change topics to policymakers. More recently, we have also developed a program to provide technical assistance to rural utilities interested in on-bill financing programs to help make energy efficiency, beneficial electrification, and renewable energy more accessible and affordable for their customers. EESI provides informative, objective, non-partisan coverage of climate change topics in our briefings, written materials, and on social media. All of our educational resources, including briefing recordings, fact sheets, issue briefs, articles, newsletters, and podcasts, are always available for free online at www.eesi.org. If you'd like to make sure you always receive our latest educational resources, take a moment to subscribe to our bi-weekly newsletter, Climate Change Solutions. We have come a long way in our journey to learn more about technologies that could help mitigate climate change through our briefing series, scaling up innovation to drive down emissions. Here we are at the fourth installment of the series, covering offshore wind energy. It seems like only yesterday we were holding briefings about green hydrogen, direct air capture, and building an electric vehicle charging infrastructure. To review presentation materials and summary notes for the entire series, and to RSVP for a really cool bonus briefing in July, visit us online at www.eesi.org. Our companion briefing series, of course, Living with Climate Change, continued last week with a fascinating discussion about extreme heat. We've also held briefings in that series about the polar vortex, sea level rise, and wildfires. We're a little busy with a little scheme to bring you a bonus briefing about integrating equity into emergency management in July, and trust me, nobody will want to miss that. So once again, be sure to subscribe to our bi-weekly newsletter, Climate Change Solutions, to learn more. I mentioned that I'm currently in Swanton, Vermont, which is pretty close to the US-Canadian border. So close, in fact, that sometimes the cell tower in Quebec catches my signal, and I get to experience all the fun of international roaming charges.  So tall that I can see them very clearly over every other structure and land feature between here and there. Every night for a few weeks each summer, I get to watch the turbines in this distance turning steadily and surely, picking up speed as the sun sets. We need lots and lots more wind turbines on and offshore to reach the scale of clean energy generation needed to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. I know some people find these wind turbines unsightly, but you can count me among those who find them really, really cool and far, far better than any polluting alternative that's available to us. But building an offshore wind energy industry is not as easy as erecting a tower here or there with rotor diameters of more than 300 feet. An offshore wind energy industry is just that, an industry that needs a supply chain, materials, logistics, trained workers for manufacturing and installation and maintenance, transmission infrastructure in a regulatory environment conducive to facilitating massive long-term investments. We do not currently have all those conditions in the United States. Some are more developed in others, but we have a long way to go. Our offshore wind energy resources are especially abundant, but currently out of reach. And that can change, but it will not happen on its own without a concerted deliberate effort. Let me remind everyone that we will have some time during our panel today or after our panel today for some questions and we will do our best to incorporate questions from our audiences we always try to do. If you have a question, you have two options to send it to us. First, you can send us an email and the email address to use is AskASK at EESI.org or even better, follow us on Twitter at EESI online and send us to us that way by responding to the live tweeting thread and bonus points if you use the hashtag EESI talk. Our first panelist is Wright Frank. Wright is the Chief of the Renewable Energy Policy Group at the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. Wright helped establish a new policy group in Bollum's Office of Renewable Energy Programs in 2021. Office conducts environmental reviews and issues development rights for offshore wind deployment. Wright, it's great to see you. I'll turn it over to you. I'm really, really looking forward to your presentation. Thank you. You can hear me, right? Loud and clear. Great, thanks. Yeah, so I'm going to be giving a status update on offshore renewable energy progress at the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. We're in the Department of the Interior, our Bollum also oversees oil and gas activities on the upper continental shelf and we have offices in Alaska, Pacific, Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic. The Atlantic is where most of the leasing, all of the leasing so far has taken place, but Pacific and Gulf of Mexico are also moving through the process and you'll be hearing more about that soon. All right, so the offshore renewable energy in the United States is really a story of two processes. There's the federal process, which is where our office oversees and then there's the states. And it's really a two stage competitive process and both the state and the federal government need to be working together in order to move projects, to advance projects. We offer the land right and in the form of leasing and then the states, we don't buy any electricity. So the states are in charge of providing whatever incentives are needed to encourage utilities to invest in offshore wind. Here's a little bit about what the states have been doing. There's ambitious targets up and down the East Coast and elsewhere. So it's pretty much every coastal state has something, even Connecticut, which doesn't have a border on the OCS, they've been involved as well. And then outside of the East, we have California, Hawaii, Oregon, and Louisiana, all have targets established. Here's a little bit of background about the growth in the technology. So back in 1991 in Denmark, they installed a turbine similar to the one next to the Statue of Liberty here. And over time, you can see that they've been getting bigger and bigger. Cape Wind was the 2007 proposal. That was three point, I think it was three point two actually, so it was a little lower than that. In 2021, you see the GE Heliade X, that's a 12 megawatt turbine. A lot of the proposals we're getting in right now describe a 14 or 15 megawatt turbine. And DOE is always thinking big and they've proposed a theoretically possible 50 megawatt turbine, which would be pretty huge as you can see in that one. But that's all very theoretical. This is our process. It takes about 10 years to go from initiating area identification through installation of turbines. And that's the things are moving along pretty well, so it can take longer. But we start with a request for interest or a call for information and nominations. This really is investigating areas and trying to determine where development may be appropriate in the future. We publish, if we decide that there's an area that's appropriate to move forward with leasing, we publish leasing notices, a proposed sale notice and a final sale notice. We hold an auction and grant leases. And then the lessees, the new lessees have a few minutes, have a, it feels like a few minutes, a few years to conduct surveys and investigate the site and then submit a construction operations plan. This is really the big, it's the cop, over here you see it in the yellow. That really is the most fleshed out description of the projects that we have. And we've determined that it's really that level of detail that we need to conduct our environmental reviews. So that's where the environmental impact statement happens. There's an environmental assessment earlier on when we're identifying sites. So then we do our environmental reviews. We approve the construction operations plan, the lessees then submit installation, design installation plans, those are the FDR and the FIR. And if we don't object to those plans, they go into effect and the lessees can begin installation. There's a lot more to it, but that's the whole process in one slide. Just to go through our lease sales and our past lease sales a little bit, our first lease sale was in 2013 off shore of Rhode Island in Massachusetts. And you can see that by the time we got to 2016 with the equinoar, the stat oil at the time, equinoar lease in New York, that was at 42 million, that was eight times more than we had received so far. So that was a real watershed. Kind of the first kind of jump in lease prices that let us know that the program was really, there was a lot of interest in the program. But as you can see on this slide, here's on the far left, there's that New York equinoar lease again, that itself was, remember, was eight times more than eight times bigger than the previous. It's really gone up a lot since then. So in 2018, in the Massachusetts lease sale, we sold $400 million worth of leases. And then the New York lease sale again was another jump. And we were now up to our most expensive lease sold to date was over a billion dollars. So that lease sale brought in $4.3 billion, which is not just good for offshore wind, but that's high for a gas lease sale too. So that seems, that shows kind of just how much momentum this has. We can talk more about whether, you know, this kind of growth in the lease sale prices is healthy for a market that's subsidized, but there's no denying the fact of, you know, where the interest has been and how it's really grown. New York is also a particularly prospective area because it can access, you know, New Jersey, New England, New York and a lot of markets where people, where states have expressed interest. Here is another graphic showing the winners of the New York lease sale. The total is there 4.37 million. But that's not our most recent lease sale. We held another one off of Carolina. This does also demonstrate that not every lease is the same, right? These in real estate location is everything and it really makes a difference where you are, but still a 315 million in high bids offshore in North Carolina. This is really the North Carolina, South Carolina border show that there's interest there as well. This is all leading to really, right now all of the development has taken place abroad with some very small exceptions. If there's going to be a real industry in the United States for this, the industry needs to, in the United States, we need the supply chain to grow up to meet the demand in the United States. And you're starting to see that everywhere from up and down the East Coast, the foundations for Block Island are pictured here. They were created in Gulf of Mexico, which has tons of experience creating jacket foundations. But we've also seen cable and blade finishing and others. Vessels are going to be a really big deal for offshore wind. They need purpose-built vessels. You need these. It's very difficult to modify an existing vessel to lift and to sell hundreds of meters into the air in ocean conditions. So the Shariptus, which is down in Diminutus commission, the Shariptus vessel will be built down near Galveston. But then the Atlantic Pioneer, the Atlantic Endeavour are service vessels, but we're going to need more. We're going to need cable-laying vessels and a lot of others. The Jones Act makes use of foreign vessels difficult and complicated. There are ways to do it, but it turns out that those vessels are also in demand in other parts of the world. Even if you wanted to do it that way, which I don't think we do, it could be difficult to get those vessels to spend time in US waters. And ports also need to be upgraded. Some of the parts of offshore wind turbines are heavier than you might expect. And the port areas need to be firmed up to be able to support that weight. You need lay-down areas. You need certain clearance requirements. And vessels can be upgraded and they are being upgraded. But this is another thing to look for in the coming years. We've also got academia stepping in to meet the need for trained individuals. And operations and maintenance will need more of those coming up, but there's already some movement there. This is kind of the leasing process offshore both coasts at a glance. We've held 10 lease sales. We have 27 issued leases, two research leases. The general activities plan is for the research lease that's offshore Virginia. And then we've got two construction operations plans approved, 10 other processes underway. We are a very, very busy office. The Coastal Virginia offshore wind projects or CVAL was the first turbines erected in federal waters offshore, about 27 miles offshore Virginia Beach. And I got to go out there and look at those a month ago and their magnets and they've been operating now for just since 2020. Here are the projects and where they, where they're proposed South Fork is one of our approved construction operations plans and they're, we're awaiting review of their facility design report and application installation report. These are engineering reports and we'll be looking at those. They're expected to be commissioned in 2023. Vineyard Wind One was the first construction operations plan approved, a slightly bigger project, offshore Massachusetts. We'll be talking about this more, I think throughout the, throughout the presentation and other people as well. But when President Biden was newly sworn in, he issued executive order 14-008, setting a goal of 30 gigawatts of offshore wind deployed by 2020, 2030. This is a pretty ambitious goal. The, it would take most of the leasing that we've already described to reach it, maybe even a little bit more. It depends a little bit on what your assumptions are for gigawatts per acre. And some of our conversions are a little conservative, but we'll, we have some other leases, lease sales scheduled in the next couple of years that will bring us over the leasing that's needed to meet that goal. And then it's up to the lessees and our environmental reviews to efficiently conduct those reviews and come to a determination on whether to approve them. Here's the leasing path forward. New York Bight and Carolina Long Bay, these are the yellow and purple. They have those lease sales have already taken place. Coming soon are Northern and Central California. There will be a proposed sale notice published sometime in the not too distant future describing them. In the Gulf of Mexico is coming soon. Actually, I think we already published, we already published the proposed sale notice. It would be the final sale notice. It would be the next California notice. Right now, I think there's an open comment period for that one. Gulf of Mexico is coming soon. Late 2020 is the goal for holding that lease sale. Late 2022 is the goal for holding that lease sale possibly into 2023. Central Atlantic, we've issued a call for information and nominations. Actually, we did that for Oregon as well, looking for commercial interest and information and comments on those areas. There's a fairly good chance the published areas will be narrowed in the future. And then the Gulf of Maine may take a little more time that's also on our list. And I think I'm probably near the end of my 10 minutes here. So that's what I've got. And I look forward to answering questions and later on in the presentation. Thank you, Wright. I think that was interesting. Hopefully I'm not sitting on any toes, Dan, or anybody by just hopping on as I'm the next one up here. So I will dive in and go ahead and share my screen. Perfect. Good afternoon. My name is Andrea Hart. I want to again, thank Wright for such a great presentation. And I think he said something that really teed up my presentation quite well is that the development of offer wind generation, certainly in our neck of the woods, which is New Jersey is, you know, it involves two initial key players, the first is the federal government and then the next is the state. So certainly coming after him seems like a natural flow. So good afternoon. My name is Andrea Hart. I work for the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities. I'm the senior program manager here for Offshore Wind. And I'll give you a little bit of background on New Jersey's efforts thus far. So Governor Murphy set a goal of achieving 7,500 megawatts of Offshore Wind generation by 2035. As a result, the BPU or the board created the Offshore Wind Renewable Energy Credit or the OREC, which is the state's funding mechanism for Offshore Wind projects. The board issued its first solicitation in 2018 with an 1,100 megawatt award to Orsted. When this was issued, the solicitation was the largest in the country and represented a very large step in achieving the state's ambitious renewable energy goals. In 2020, the board issued a second solicitation which resulted in two more Offshore Wind projects being awarded, totaling more than 2,600 megawatts. As you can see from the chart here in the schedule, three more solicitations are scheduled to occur in order to meet that 7,500 megawatt goal. These are large infrastructure projects which will span 20 plus years and involve numerous parties starting with the federal government, the state, and then all the way down to the local store-lying communities. It certainly is a critical piece in decarbonizing our grid and transitioning to the clean energy future. So the question is, there's kind of two buckets when we think of the efforts New Jersey is taking. The first bucket regarding Offshore Wind, the first bucket is generation, so the Offshore Wind farms and projects themselves. The second bucket is transmission. So how do we build transmission to support Offshore Wind projects? And essentially how do you deliver that electricity generated from the Offshore Wind farm to New Jersey residents? So under our first two solicitations which have already been awarded three projects, we requested a bundled approach that is each Offshore Wind project would bring their own electricity onshore themselves. So it's a generation and transmission bundled together. You can see how this might result in some inefficiency use, particularly as new wind farms are added. We call this the spaghetti approach. So each of the wind farms bringing their cables onshore. So there's numerous cables coming onshore. So that's the spaghetti of the spaghetti approach. Seeing that there's some potential inefficiencies as we increase our goals and additional wind farms would be added, the board staff began to identify the benefits of a more coordinated transmission solution which would support Offshore Wind generation projects. So in New Jersey and other Atlantic states, the transmission planning process is based on a detailed set of rules approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and implemented by our regional grid operator PJM. These rules determine how and when to expand and enhance our regional grid and outline a highly competitive robust procurement structure to select which projects get built. To position the state to reach Governor Phil Murphy's ambitious 7,500 megawatts of Offshore Wind energy, the BPU formally requested inclusion of its Offshore Wind policy into the regional transmission expansion process. This competitive solicitation is known as the state agreement approach. So I'm gonna refer to that as the FAA. The FAA is a tool offered by PJM for its member states to request transmission development needs based on policy requirements. New Jersey was the first state to utilize the FAA and by initiating a competitive solicitation for transmission projects from a broad pool of regional developers, the BPU is ensuring that New Jersey can select from the most efficient and effective options available on the market in pursuit of a coordinated transmission solution for delivering Offshore Wind. PJM's robust competitive bidding process forces developers to propose lower cost and innovative proposals resulting in efficiency and rate payer saving. Opening the proposal window to all qualified PJM developers allowed for a diversity of approaches. PJM with BPU staff developed the solicitation for electric transmission projects for the FAA. The solicitation requested applications of four distinct options thrown on the next slide with each entity having the choice to propose more than one option. When staff was first exploring the FAA approach, we were unsure of how many applications we might receive, if any. It was a novel approach. It's a part of PJM's operating agreement that's never really been utilized. And so we were thinking if we received five applications, it would be a success. We ended up receiving 80 projects from 13 unique entities. This phenomenal response was a clear indicator that the market, that we were doing something right from the market's perspective that there was a demand and some solutions that might work. Under the state agreement approach, the BPU is the ultimate decision maker deciding which, if any, of the proposals proceed to construction. These projects are not likely to be pursued if they do not result in development of a lower cost, lower risk or higher benefit option for the state of New Jersey. So as I mentioned earlier, in our solicitation under the state agreement approach, New Jersey decided to solicit BID for the following options. The first is in green and these are upgrades to the existing grid. The option 1B, which is the orange, takes those on-shore upgrades and brings them out closer to the shoreline. So they would interconnect with offshore wind projects. Option 2 is the yellow line and that brings the grid out into the ocean to interconnect with projects. And then the third option is what we refer to as a backbone approach and that's really connecting all the offshore wind farms to one another providing kind of the first link in what might be a main to Florida backbone for offshore wind interconnection. Now this was just New Jersey's approach to the state agreement approach. Other states should they choose to follow something similar can design a solicitation that would best and uniquely fit their needs for offshore wind development. BPU staff is currently working with PJM to evaluate the proposals and the board may select the best project or project but it might select no project at all. On April 15th, FERC approved our FAA agreement and this was really exciting news for the state because again it was another boat of confidence and certainly a blessing from the federal government that we were on the right track that we had our terms and conditions that were in place and that we were good to proceed. So I wanna talk a little bit about how the FAA and certainly New Jersey's offshore wind goals fit into the federal government's larger goals. So as Wright previously mentioned there's been an enormous exciting development of the New York by lease area which is one of BOM's many lease areas that was auctioned off. It was recently auctioned off earlier this year totaling close to four and a half billion dollars. These lease areas fit out of off of New Jersey's coast that will likely many of them some of them will play into the New Jersey market. So you can see that there is a demand there the market is telling us that there is money to be made here. These are infrastructure projects going out into the ocean that also lead to long-term infrastructure projects on board to connect the offshore wind farm. So there's a lot of steps in this process the state being one of many. Thinking about how the FAA and how New Jersey offshore wind can fit into the federal government's larger goals is really, I think it can come down to a few things. The first is availability of federal funding. Like I said, these lease areas went for a lot of money that may mean as offshore wind developers who've paid those prices and are now looking to build into New Jersey that means New Jersey ratepayers may be offsetting those costs. It may mean if they play into New York New York ratepayers may be offsetting those costs. So I think the availability of federal funding to help offset those costs that the states have created this market for offshore wind and potentially subsidizing those costs so that's not solely absorbed by the states would be one way to encourage greater offshore wind development. The other is how do we apply the investment tax credit to clean energy transmission facilities? Currently the ITC or the investment tax credit is applicable only to generation. So how do we supply the ITC to standalone transmission projects that support the development of renewables? There's also the question of how to ensure the funds from IIJA would be applicable to offshore wind transmission. So the second consideration I wanted to put forth is the regional coordination. So not just New Jersey, electrons don't know what states are in there's gotta be a lot of cross coordination among certainly neighboring states. So how do states engage with one another to maximize renewable energy development, efficiency and transmission needs? I think we could get certainly some help and guidance from the federal government and this is a new industry that's never really been explored before here. And so really how do we build this in a way that makes the most sense certainly for neighboring states? And the last note is timing. So there's certainly a timing challenge for New Jersey who has already been a first responder, first mover on this and getting ahead as one of the earliest movers of offshore wind development and certainly a coordinated offshore wind transmission approach. Currently there's not federal funding available for this. So how do we access that and essentially not be penalized for moving early and supporting these efforts? So understanding the timing is of the essence. The goal is both at the federal level and at the state's level is incredibly aggressive. So how do we encourage early movers and not penalize those that have already taken steps to develop these offshore wind efforts? So with that, I'll close. I have my information here. Should you need and have any questions? And I want to thank you so much for your time and it's such a critical process and development both at the state level and at the national level that we're excited to be here. Thanks Andrea. Sorry I dropped off my Zoom crash and it took everything down with me. So please allow me to give you a proper introduction although somewhat belatedly. The presentation you just heard was expertly presented by Andrea Hart. Andrea is a senior program manager offshore wind at the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities. Andrea leads the board's efforts on PJM's inaugural state agreement approach for offshore wind transmission which is implemented would be the first of its kind in the nation and will deliver 7,500 megawatts of offshore wind to the state. That probably would have made more sense at the beginning of your presentation but Zoom crashed and then we had to go through the whole setup and all the recovery. So sorry about that but thank you for being a good sport and a trooper and just taking control. Great, thank you. My pleasure Dan, thank you. Our third panelist today, actually before I introduce John both Wright and Andrea had great slides. I would also like to just add a quick reminder that all of the presentation materials from today are available on our website www.eesi.org. Wright's slides were super interesting, lots of great detail and sort of what the process looks like. So if you'd like to go back and revisit those or Andrea's or the slides of our other panelists you can do that. You also have an opportunity folks in our audience to submit questions and you can send us an email ateesi.org, that's ASK ateesi.org. You can also follow us on Twitter ateesi online. And now I get to introduce our third panelist on time which is a nice change. John Begala is the Vice President for Federal and State Policy at the Business Network for Offshore Wind, a nonprofit educational organization with a mission to develop the offshore wind renewable energy industry and a supply chain. John, welcome to our briefing today. I'll turn it over to you. And thank you so much for having us. I really appreciate it and it is an honor to be up here with many of the other key players here in this industry today. And I would like to kind of frame my conversation here as the third leg of the stool as our friend from Bohm and Andrea, we're talking about is there basically a three-part partnership that makes offshore wind happen. And the first, of course, is the federal government, the second, the state, and the third are the businesses. And just a quick background on who we are as an organization, we're a 501C3 nonprofit organization. Our focus is developing the US offshore wind industry and specifically the supply chain. And what does that mean? That means the tier one manufacturers. That means the OEMs, but also the tier two, tier three manufacturers, and then all of the other really important supporting roles. So the labor organizations, state governments, educational institutions, we count them all among our members currently at approximately 500 members at this point. And what we really do with those members is we provide them information on what's happening in the market. We provide them education on how to enter the market and then introductions for folks who are new to the offshore wind industry to be able to speak with some of the other players that have been in the industry for longer and then can share some expertise. As I said earlier, it's a three-part structure. And why this is so important to understand is that what the states and what BOEM is doing for the supply chain is they're providing them certainty. They're providing them, like Wright mentioned during his presentation, this leasing path forward. It allows the major manufacturers to be able to say with certainty, if I invest in this new manufacturing facility, I feel confident that I'll have off-takers. But again, you can't have that unless you have the states also acting in concert with the federal government being able to establish those off-take pathways. And a quick note on the off-take, we are seeing an incredible increase in state interest in procuring more offshore wind as a part of their renewable portfolios. As more and more states move towards 100% renewables, we are seeing that offshore wind is going to have to play a very key role. It's a form of power that is located near major metropolitan centers along the East Coast and doesn't have some of the same land use issues that other onshore renewable energy generation sometimes runs into. And so it's an excellent complement to the other forms of power generation that will be making up the full suite of offshore or of renewable energy generation. To give you a sense of where we stand right now on off-take, there are currently 17.5 gigawatts worth of offshore energy that have been procured by the states that basically means that the state, such as NJBPU, has agreed with one of the developers that once the project has been built and all the permitting has been signed off, that they will be buying that power. And as you can see, almost half of that activity took place during 2021. And that's really reflective of the federal government's leading role that they've taken over the last year and a half now in really establishing certainty for the market and establishing this path forward. Where those procurements are coming from are primarily from New York and New Jersey. However, Massachusetts and Maryland are also playing a role in coming to agreements with some projects that are sighted off of those coasts. And we are really excited to see how this industry is expanding up and down the coast as a part of its growth. And this kind of gives you a visual. And Wright had this as a part of his presentation as well. But as you can see, these projects stretch from, the active projects at least, stretch from Massachusetts coast all the way down to the newest lease area you can see at the bottom, which is number 22 on my map here, which is the Carolina Long Bay. Now, Wright mentioned this very briefly, but I'd like to reemphasize the importance of Boehm's action to begin to move the ball forward on the California auction, which we are excited to see hopefully happen at the end, towards the end of this year. That's gonna provide approximately another four and a half gigawatts worth of potential power between the Moro Bay and Humble Bay wind energy areas. Those are listed as number 23 and 24 on the California map up into the left there. And then as he mentioned as well, the Gulf of Mexico is soon going to be opening up for further wind energy areas and then eventually lease areas. And this is going to allow the supply chain, which already stretches across the country to develop more fully along the Gulf Coast, which is really exciting. And as an organization, we have seen an incredible amount of growth in the Gulf. We have a market dashboard, which tracks the number of contracts that have been awarded within the offshore wind industry. And we've seen that 23% of those contracts have come from companies based in the Gulf of Mexico, which is reflective of the national nature of our supply chain. And I'll actually be getting back to this point later on in my presentation. This is a very brief overview of that leasing path forward. And as you can see, it does cover the entire US. It covers all of the coasts and it's going to be able to provide more businesses, more certainty, but also more durability for the industry. Because the more states that are, the offshore wind is providing power for and creating jobs for, the more certainty I think that we can have that as administrations may change over time, the benefits from these projects are going to be felt in the local communities. And therefore the industry itself is going to have a lot more durability and not so reliant on any particular political party. Putting in perspective, the Biden administration's 2025 goals, I think is a really good way of understanding just how ambitious some of these targets are. And we think that that's a very good thing. The administration is committed to getting 16 cops approved by 2025. We expect that that'll represent approximately 19 gigawatts of offshore wind power, potentially more depending on the size of the turbines that are actually deployed on those projects. To put that in context, there are 50 gigawatts approximately deployed globally and the UK and Germany combined currently for 20 gigawatts. And those are two of the biggest markets in the world. So what the US is attempting to do is be able to, by between now and 2030, get onto a pathway to become a global leader in offshore wind. And currently we're seeing that the investments are tracking and should be able to get us to that goal by 2030. On the point of investments, you cannot build an industry without having extensive manufacturing supply chain. These early projects are certainly going to rely on a lot of international cooperation to be able to build them. But as the industry continues to expand and as the European countries continue to increase their targets, you're gonna see a real restriction of international supply chains and we'll need to be able to rely on domestic supply chains to build out this industry. And as I mentioned earlier, that comes with its own benefit in that the more communities that are getting jobs and seeing new manufacturing facilities stood up as a result of offshore wind, the more likely it is that we're gonna continue to see this industry move forward in the coming decade. As I mentioned very briefly earlier, we have seen a remarkable breadth of the supply chain. It covers 46 of the 50 states here in the U.S. and it represents both coasts as well as some companies here in the central U.S. The way that as an organization we track this is we have what we call the supply chain connect database. This allows companies to self-identify as being capable of providing the services needed for the or materials needed for the offshore wind industry. And then that also allows them to be identified by developers, tier one manufacturers who are looking to source their supply chain domestically or in some states cases locally, depending on how the state has set up its procurement rules. This was touched on briefly, but I would like to go into a little bit more depth. The ports issue is really key. I mean, obviously you can't build an offshore project without the correct port infrastructure and offshore wind in particular has really incredible port requirements. These are massive projects with incredible piece weight. So the, for example, the foundation of an offshore wind turbine is most likely in the U.S. on the East Coast going to be what's called monopile. This is a structure that is approximately 42 feet across in width and as tall as depending on the water depth as tall as about 200 feet tall. And that piece, that single piece can weigh as much as 2,500 metric tons. So to be able to support that you have to have extensive port infrastructure not only a high load bearing capacity but also ample quayside dioxide space for the barge or the TIV to pull up next to that manufacturing location and then also the physical space to lay down all of these parts which may seem like a simple answer but if you think about most of our ports we are blessed to have many active ports here in the United States. And so a lot of that port space is already taken up by cargo, container ports, personal private yachts. And so we have to be able to figure out where we can be staging all these materials. This has been certainly a challenge for the industry but it's also an opportunity because as we begin to invest in these ports you begin to see so many local jobs created and the benefits really move outward into the community. Now part of the way that we've seen the money coming through is through the IJAs increase in funding for the Port Infrastructure Development Program. Just this year, $29.5 million was awarded through the Port Infrastructure Development Program for the Port of Albany where they'll be creating a tower manufacturing facility and they'll also be manufacturing transition pieces which connect the foundation to the tower and hold the whole thing together. Down in Virginia, my home state, $20 million was awarded through the Port Infrastructure Development Program for the Portsmouth Marine Terminal we will have a effectively a blade assembly facility and a staging facility to be able to put the components together and then eventually take them out to the CVAL project and potentially other projects up and down the coast if that agreement works out. Now as an organization, one of the things that we do is we participate in some very extensive study and research with the National Renewable Energy Labs and the NowRDC, which is the National Offshore Wind Research and Development Consortium. Most recently, we've published a paper which contains this chart right here which takes these 30 gigawatt by 2030 goals and turns them into demand. So we have to understand if we're gonna build out these projects, well, what are the demands gonna be on the industry both from a manufacturing, a workforce perspective but also importantly a ports perspective. Now as you can see from this stoplight chart on the right, there is a reasonable number of ports that will be able to participate in what's called a barge and feedering method where you have a barge that comes to the dock and picks up the goods and then takes it out to the open ocean, to the OCS where it then transfers those materials to the turbine installation vessel. However, the Dominion Vessel Caribdis is soon to come online and we are hopeful that there will be more TIVs as well in the US market. And so we'll need to be able to have the port infrastructure that can support the docking and loading of those extremely large vessels. So as things move forward, we are hopeful that between the federal government and state governments and the private sector we can see further investment in our port infrastructure like I said earlier bringing local jobs but also making these projects possible. Now looking ahead to the West Coast the port infrastructure is going to likely pose a challenge. The West Coast obviously has many active ports but part of the issue is that they're too active. They have lots and lots of containers moving in and out and part of what you have to figure out is where you can site these locations and where you can do it where the turbine installation vessels can come in and not be conflicting with the activity of shipping and other commercial activities. And so as you can see many of the ports currently on the West Coast are currently insufficient for developing some of the floating offshore wind that will be required to develop the West Coast. Now I'm not gonna go too far in depth on that. I know we have a professor coming up at the end of the presentation here who's going to go into more detail. But the basic top line here is that there is even more area required in order to build out a floating offshore wind turbine and stage all those materials at the port. As I mentioned briefly earlier, we track all of this information through our market dashboard. And over the course of the year and a half, our dashboard has found a 165% increase in contracts awarded within the industry. Being able to track all of these gives us an understanding of not only where the industry stands right now where certain projects stand but we can get kind of a good sense of where things are gonna be going in the future. And finally, as I mentioned earlier, we also host the supply chain connect. We host it nationally and then we also participate with a good number of states to be the backbone for their databases so that if companies in their state want to submit their information and potentially participate in these projects, they can send that all into the state supply chain connect and we'll host the backend data and then conduct searches, provide information as necessary. If you have any questions on this, I'd be more than happy to answer it and I just wanna thank again all the folks at EESI for inviting us and I appreciate the opportunity to participate. That was a great overview, John. Thanks so much for that presentation. Really appreciate it. Our fourth panelist is Lauren Farnsworth and Lauren is the offshore wind program manager for the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center which develops and implements programs to ensure that Massachusetts workers have the skills, training and certifications necessary to participate in the offshore wind industry. Lauren, it's great to see you. Looking forward to your presentation. Thank you so much, Dan and thanks for the invitation to speak on today's panel and talk a little bit more about Massachusetts Clean Energy Center's role and offshore wind workforce development. So first of all, Mass CEC as we call it is a state quasi public agency in Massachusetts. We're an economic development agency focused entirely on clean energy industry and we have a focus area specific to offshore wind. So that's the team that I am on and I'm leading our offshore wind workforce efforts. And I'd like to sort of give an overview of our initiatives in this space to date and then I'm going to also give some insight into some of the projects that we have in Massachusetts that are working to train folks and expose them to this industry. So first of all, it's important to understand what sort of are the job opportunities in offshore wind? We can look at it in the view of the phases of the project which is sort of how I like to break it down. And you can look at it in these three phases starting with planning and development. So a lot of these job opportunities are hired by the project developers themselves and they tend to be positions for folks who might have higher education degrees, advanced degrees and engineering research or planning. And this phase typically lasts between five and seven years of getting the project up and ready to run. Once we reach into the construction and installation phase a lot of those job opportunities tend to go toward skilled labor. Vineyard Wind historically signed last year in July of 2021 a project labor agreement with the Massachusetts Building Trades Council. So that sort of solidified the role of these local unions in the construction of that project. And then of course there's the operations of maintenance phase of the wind farm which typically is around 25 to 30 years of upkeep. And these folks will be really highly skilled and trained to work offshore to be maintaining the turbines themselves. Keeping up with the not only the structure but also the cables and substations. And so we will break that down a little bit further as we move on. So on this next slide I'd like to touch upon kind of Massey sees development strategy. So overall our goal for offshore wind workforce development is to develop a well-trained and highly skilled workforce with emphasis on diversity and safety. And we sort of take this approach to get there and to meet that goal. So starting off with research and analysis. Massey see has commissioned two different offshore wind workforce assessments so that we can better understand sort of what are the gaps in the labor supply and what is the demand in our state. And we have used these in the results of these assessments to inform our overall support of a lot of our workforce development programs. We're also really actively engaged with the offshore wind industry. We have pretty much standing meetings weekly or bi-weekly with some of the developers to better understand how we can sort of tailor our efforts to meet their needs and what they're seeing as their projects progress. We're also investing in a lot of these programs. I'm going to introduce you to our offshore wind works program in the next slide and talk about some of our grant opportunities. And we are supporting a lot of these programs, especially with a focus and a lens toward diversity, equity, inclusion and justice. I think this new, exciting industry poses a lot of opportunity for folks. And we want to make sure we're helping to develop it responsibly and also in an equitable way so that many of the people in Massachusetts who come from underserved communities and maybe underemployed have the opportunity and sort of the support to get there if they're interested in job opportunities. And finally, we work to convene groups that are sort of interested in stakeholders and bringing people together to be able to share best practices, which we think is really important, especially when you think about developing a new industry and making sure that projects align and there's not too much overlap. So moving on, I'm going to introduce you here to Mass ECC's Offshore Wind Works program. So we have had to date four rounds of competitive grant solicitations to support offshore wind workforce development programs initiatives. And we sort of have outlined in each of these solicitations our preferred focus areas and the projects that we're looking to support. Typically those focus areas are infrastructure for training facilities, skilled labor, partnerships with industry, higher education, training programs, education. And we'd always also include, you know, a focus area to increase the access for those underrepresented communities into the industry. Unfortunately, in the first two rounds, that aspect of many of the proposals was sort of lacking. So we took a step back and in our third round of Offshore Wind Works solicitation, we shifted focus entirely into what we call the Accessed Opportunity Grant Program. So this solicitation was really put into place so that we could increase participation of outlined priority group members into these existing workforce programs to reduce barriers for those individuals who are interested in pursuing roles in Offshore Wind and also to provide sort of industry exposure or career guidance and counseling on Offshore Wind career pathways. And that is really what we tailored our efforts to in 2021. Now in 2022, we have just issued and awarded our fourth round of grants and we now have over 20 different entities in our group. A really important piece of our Offshore Wind Works program is that we sort of have an approach that is decentralized. So MacCC is sort of supporting many different entities around the state. And we have decided that it's so important to create an ecosystem where these different grantees can sort of come together, share what they're working on, ask questions of the group, share struggles. This way, MacCC can really understand where there might be overlaps or where we should tailor our support programs. So we call this our Offshore Wind Workforce Community of Practice. And we do regularly sort of convene that group and we'll going forward. So it's certainly an important part of the program. So next up, I would like to quickly just touch upon a few of our grantees here and some of the work that they're doing in our state. Okay. So one of our members here of our Community of Practice, two actually, because they're a partnership, is Browning the Green Space. They are a nonprofit in the Boston area that are looking to help people of color kind of gain access into the clean energy industry and really provide support and outreach. And they're partnered with Exodus Group, which is an energy consulting firm. And they really provide sort of the technical background and knowledge on the offshore wind industry in general. So the partnership created, I think, is a really strong example of two entities working together utilizing their respective sort of areas of expertise to accelerate our industry and make sure these job opportunities are equitable. So here's our second spotlight on Massachusetts Maritime Academy. Mass Maritime was the first facility in the U.S. to offer all five modules of what we call the Global Wind Organization, or GWO, Basic Safety Training for Offshore Wind. That came through support from Mass EC during our Offshore Wind Works solicitation support. I really like this picture. Some might not realize how sort of immense that step is from vessel to transition piece on a offshore wind turbine, but it really is. As you can imagine, a crew transfer vessel in the water with any sort of ocean activity might be moving up and down quite a bit. So having that skilled training to be able to take the necessary steps and certifications to go from vessel to turbine is something that is kind of top of mind, of course, at Mass EC. So this is a great example of one of the programs we've supported in the training for safety that will be so crucial to developing this industry. So I wish I could touch upon all of our great Offshore Wind Works community of practice members and talk about their respective projects, which are all really fascinating, but please do check out our website. We have a full list of all the organizations and a summary of their projects online. And you can see here that we, to date, have invested almost $8 million in grants to support over 20 of these organizations that are sort of in our ecosystem of Offshore Wind Workforce Development. So thank you so much, everyone. Please don't hesitate to reach out. We have questions and you can find lots of information I mentioned today on our website. Thanks, Lauren. And congratulations for almost $8 million in awards. Those organizations are very lucky to have a partner like Mass EC. I'm sure lots of other organizations and other states probably wish they had similar programs. So congratulations, that's really cool stuff. Thank you so much. Our final panelist, absolutely. Our final panelist today is Dr. Habib Dager. Habib is the founding executive director of the Advanced Structures and Composites Center, a National Science Foundation funded research center at the University of Maine. Habib is a world leading advocate for developing sustainable infrastructure and energy systems which simultaneously optimize structures, materials, manufacturing, construction and maintenance. Habib, thank you for being with us today. I'm really looking forward to learning about floating offshore wind technology. And thank you very much. Can you hear me okay and see the slides? I can hear you great. Thank you. And see you great. Thank you very much. Great to be here with you. We're really honored to be with a wonderful panelist that you've had here today. My goal today is to talk about the next generation of floating wind and how can the U.S. take a leadership role in floating wind technology? As you know, Europe built its first offshore wind farm in 1991 and that's where the industry was born and they're ahead of us in many ways in developing the supply chain and their industry. Whereas in floating wind, these are turbines that float over the water, we have an opportunity in the U.S. to take a leadership role if we make the right investments in research and development and port facilities and training and so forth. So the goal here is to talk about floating wind technologies. I'd like to start by acknowledging the S Department of Energy's ERE Wind Technology Office in ARPA-E who funded a lot of research we've done over the last decade or so on floating wind here in Maine. Like those acknowledge our Congressional Delegations that are Collins King and Congresswoman Pingree and Congressman Golden have all been very in a bipartisan way supportive of these efforts, both in Maine and nationally. So what is a floating wind turbine? It's a turbine that floats over the water and the question is why do I need a floating turbine? The reason for that is when you have water depth above about 150 feet, you can't fix the tower to the seabed anymore. You have to float the turbine and that creates quite a few opportunities which we'll talk about in just a short while. So what does it look like? You have a floating hull almost like a floating boat if you wish and a tower like a mast on a boat if you wish and a turbine on top of it. What keeps the unit on station so it doesn't move away is our mooring lines. So you could see the floating hull here that has three mooring lines on it and each mooring lines is connected to an anchor on the seabed. That allows of course the turbine to move around a certain amount as the wind and waves flows on it but it stays within a constricted area. And then the power cable in a floating turbine is a bit different than a fixed-based turbine because you need a power cable that actually can follow the hull as the hull moves around in its watch circle. And you can see here there's a power cable that goes down from the center of the hull and makes what we call the lazy wave. It has buoyancy modules. It floats actually the cable within the water column and then goes back down to the seabed and it can be buried afterwards after that. But that's what a floating turbine looks like. There's different sizes of these or different designs of these. This is called the semi-submersible design that we've developed at the University of Maine that's made out of concrete. We call it the Voltonus Floating Concrete Hall. To give you a sense of scale, I don't know if you could see it on your screen but I'm gonna point to the school bus. That's the school bus that's floating right next to the unit right where my pointer is to give you a sense of the scale, the kind of structures that we're talking about. A bit about us. We are at the University of Maine where the flagship university in the state of Maine. Recently we became in our one research institution which puts us on the top 4% of universities and colleges in research in the United States. Our research center was founded by the National Science Foundation. It's called the Advanced Structures and Composite Center. We have about 260 faculty, staff, and students that are looking to try to bring green energy and green materials to the state, the country, and the world. Some of the facilities we have in our lab, for example, to help drive some of these technologies is a wind blade test facility. This is a 160 foot blade being fatigued here to look at its durability before it can be deployed out there. This is a wave wind basin that we've also built to help develop floating technologies. This is a wave basin where we can create waves of different frequencies and so forth. But also right at the end here, you see an open jet wind tunnel. That's the wind tunnel that will create windstorms over a wavestorm so we can actually test these different designs at scale. These kinds of facilities are key to the future of the US technological leadership in these areas. That's why we built that in Maine. There's an international global race to design and build floating turbine technologies. Countries are investing significantly across the globe to lead in this new space. You can see all these different designs out there. There's over 50 designs that I know of and growing quickly right now. How do they actually work? There are four categories of designs. You can see them in here. And they're all borrowed from the oil and gas industry. So think of oil and gas platforms designs have been actually modified to support wind turbines. They're not as big as the oil and gas platforms, but yet they have very similar methodologies. And you'd hear words such as tension leg platforms, barge designs, semi-submersible designs or spar designs. And they're a bit different, but at the bottom line, what they allow you to do is to float a turbine and prevent it from essentially capsizing in 500-year storms that could have 70-foot waves and so forth. So these are the four designs that people look at right now. I'd like to point to two of them. One is called the spar design. It's like a big floating tube. The tube could have a diameter of 30 to 40 feet and it could be 250 feet below the water. And it has a mass at the bottom like a keel if you wish and the rest of it is air. And the thaw is connected to it. Think of it as if you took a one liter Pepsi bottle and you emptied it out and put some sand at the bottom and toss it in the water, it should stand vertically up. And that's what a spar is, except there's a very big Pepsi bottles. The other design is called a semi-submersible that's the most commonly used today. And I'll focus a bit on that. That one has typically a number of hulls that are full of air essentially to keep it from tipping over in the water. And think of it as a catamaran. If you've sailed a catamaran, a catamaran is a boat with two hulls. And the farther you put the two hulls apart, the more stable it is. Instead of having a catamaran, we could have a trimaran in this case in what you see in the picture here for a semi-sub. So the bigger these flotation columns are and the farther apart they are, the more stable the semi-sub is. So why is it important in the U.S. to have floating wind? If you look at this map put together by the National Renewable Energy Lab, the dark areas off the coast of the U.S. require floating technologies. They have too deep water. The light areas could use fixed bottom technologies. So if you look at the East Coast, you have a lot of light blue areas and that's where the industry is starting. You've heard it from Bohm, you've heard it from Jersey and New York and the business network for offshore wind. That's mostly been fixed bottom technologies. But as we fill up, if you wish this fixed bottom sites on the East Coast, we're gonna have to go to floating turbine technologies where we go to deeper waters. And that's why it's so important because 60% of our offshore wind resource within 50 miles in the U.S. will require floating technologies. And that's true across the world as well. In the Gulf of Maine alone, we have 156 gigawatts of floating wind capacity. And in Maine and parts of the Northeast, you could see floating wind is very important. If you go to the West Coast, floating wind is the only option they have as well as we do in Maine, because of all dark blue areas you see over here. There are, Bohm, as you heard earlier, it's going to be issuing three floating leases by 2025. In the Gulf of Maine, then California, then Oregon. Now globally, there's a pipeline for floating wind that's been identified just over the last week, close to about 121 gigawatts. If you put a number on that, that's roughly half a trillion dollars of investment in floating wind globally that we know of today. And you could see that the leading country is Great Britain at 33 gigawatts, then Sweden at 18 gigawatts. You look at Southeast Asia also is moving in a major direction. Japan's gonna go into floating as well. But the U.S. has plans potentially on the books for about eight gigawatts. Of course, nothing built yet. In Maine, what have we been doing? Because our only option is floating wind within researching floating wind technologies. And that's our technology roadmap to get there.  So we've developed the technology and deployed a floating turbine back in 2013. Next year, we start construction of an 11 megawatt unit that we were deploying off Maine's coast. By 26, 27, we'd like to build the research array of 12 turbines. And then beyond that, by 2030 start building commercial farms. And this is the one to eight scale we deployed back in 2013. It's a, and you could see it's, even though it's one to eight scale, you can see the people below it. It's fairly back in size. And then we towed it out to sea. So we made the whole thing dock side and towed the whole thing out to sea. And that's the beauty of floating wind. You don't need the big, heavy vessels to go erect them. You can actually erect them dock side in the port facility and tow them out to sea. And that's what we're doing here or towing this out to sea. It took us about 12 hours to get it to its final location. And the final location were with off Castine, Maine. And we moved it to the seabed using three mooring chains just like you have on a boat instead of having one mooring anchor on a boat. You have three in this case, one in each corner and in a chain steel chain connected to the hull. We also had an undersea cable that takes the power from the turbine down to the mainland. And this is the very first major storm we saw. It was a 50 year return period storm relative to the hull size. And you can see here looking at this 50 year storm, you can't even see the hull move. So our data showed that it is a feasible technology. The hull is made out of concrete and our goal now is to scale that up and hopefully take advantage of it throughout the country as well. So this is the equivalent of 60 foot waves and you can't see the whole move. So these technologies do work. The next phase for us is two projects, one called Aquaventus of Monhegan Island and what's called Mira. That's a 10, 15 megawatt units 20 miles south of that. I'm gonna move on here very briefly but talk about the offshore cable, the electrical cable from a floating turbine has to be supported in the water column using buoyancy modules as you see. It forms a lazy S wave that's different than fixed bottoms that creates some very interesting research problems particularly in California where you have 2,400 feet of water. So that creates issues. The advantage of floating wind is that you can put them beyond the horizon where people don't see them and you can also reduce fishing impacts and visual impacts and impacts on other uses of the ocean. So that's how we mourn to the seabed. That's the anchor we use is called a drag anchor. You drag it into the mud and you attach it to the hull. This is the research array that Maine would hope to have built by 2027. It's got 10, 15 megawatt turbines but we also need port facilities. You heard about that earlier here and floating wind ports are different than fixed bottom ports. They need more deeper water and they need no obstructions between the ports and the ocean because you install the tower and turbids on there. We don't have them in the US today and investment in a port facility like that might be closer to $250 million or more. So that's an important thing that we need to do if we're gonna get floating wind happen in the US. And the other thing we need to do is continue to invest in research and development so that the US stays ahead of the game in this technology space and hopefully be a leader in floating wind technologies. So investment both in the Department of Energy's Wind Technology Office for research and development as well as in RPA-E are so important for us to be able to reach these goals. And finally, there's all kinds of interesting opportunities. I wanna leave you with a very interesting thought. Could we print boats in the future of vessels? And in Maine, we've actually tried to see if we can and we've printed a boat in our laboratory a year ago. It's a 25-foot vessel that weighs about 5,000 pounds. It's a marine patrol vessel. We started on Thursday night and finished on Sunday night and that's the boat being printed. This industry, as you heard earlier is gonna require a lot of vessels. Are there different ways to produce them here faster in the US and maybe printing them as an opportunity. But to do that and get there, we need investments in research and development. And so I appreciate the, I look forward to hear, to get your questions. Thank you. Thanks, Stevie. That was really cool. That's really cool. I could, that's actually kind of mesmerizing to watch. Why don't we invite our panelists to turn their videos on and we have some time for questions. We actually got two really interesting questions from our audience and since we have a 15-ish minute, I'm gonna actually start with those. And Andrea, the first one, I'm very interested and I think they can be sort of broadened out to sort of more general questions. But Andrea, I'm gonna start with you because it came in in response to your presentation and then I'll open it up for others. Outside of the efforts to develop the FAA working with PJM and FERC, how is the current interconnection queue affected the timeline for offshore wind and are there similar constraints in our interconnection queue constraints around the country that we should be watching? But Andrea, I'll start with you and then I'll open it up to the group. Dan, thank you. That's an excellent question and an enormous consideration. So the PJM queue process is actually currently undergoing reform because it's been so problematic. There's just wild delays in the way it's set up. A lot of projects enter the queue and then fall out, which makes lead to long-term planning both timely and costly. So right now the current projects that have been awarded which is there's two Orsted projects and one Atlantic Shores, which is an EDF parent company projects are struggling with those very issues, potential delays relating to the PJM queue process. And again, it's really timely and there's a lot of game playing involved in that process that is above, I mean, I think nobody has a firm grasp on exactly like the, there's so many movable variables. So that's really one of the reasons, one of the drivers that the state agreement approach was so attractive to us in addition to avoiding that spaghetti-like inefficiency of the cables coming on store. One of the additional benefits of doing something through the SAA process is actually getting the transmission solution in place well before the generation projects come online. So the solution is the transmission capability is there waiting for the generation projects to interconnect. So the generation projects that de-risk those projects because they're not waiting on a risky queue reform because the SAA solution has already done that. So how this would work if an SAA transmission project is selected it would be up and running or it'd be available for those generation projects to interconnect to. I'll pause there if my other. Yeah, and I see other panelists nodding. So Habib, Wright, Lauren, John, please feel free to weigh in with any comments if you have any. If I may, I just say Andrea is right on here. That's so important, what she's trying to do here. And Europe has been able to actually drive costs down Sweden for offshore wind by doing exactly what Andrea has proposed. And by decoupling, if you wish, the risks of transmission distribution from the other parts of the development of the project you can drive costs way down and benefit society. So I'd like to take the next level and say, could we have an interstate system if you wish developed for offshore wind transmission that is really sponsored by the federal government very much like what we created the interstate system what it did to our country. Can we create that for offshore wind and expand what Andrea is doing up and down both coasts if you wish. I just mentioned, I think what New Jersey is doing is really exciting and showing some leadership on that. So I think it's really great. There's also, FERC has published some rulemaking proposals to try to get into cost allocation and some of the other issues and NQ issues. So there's a lot of efforts going on but not every, there's a lot to be worked out still too. Dan, if I might, I think maybe I dove in too quickly and maybe just a quick 30 second overview of what like the Q is for viewers that don't maybe know what that is. It's exactly what it sounds like. It's when you want to interconnect into your regional transmission grid, you need to get permission to do so in order. And that permission really, some of the larger things they look at, it's pretty complicated but it's making sure that there's not gonna be reliability issues if you interconnect. It's not going to overload an existing line or substation, just like a water pipe, transmission pipes have a capacity. So you can't keep adding to transmission without expanding it. Similarly, you can't keep adding to a water pipe without it first thing. So that's really what the Q process is. So the Q process, a generator would come to the regional transmission planning association organization, ask, say, hey, we're looking to interconnect at this point with this and much and they'll do a pretty in depth thorough analysis on what that means. But there's a queue. So there might be tons of folks in front of you, tons of folks behind you, trying to get that analysis and determination completed. Great. Thanks for that. That's really helpful. The cliff notes. Yeah, no, that was great. That was very helpful. So we're gonna treat the next couple of questions as sort of lightning round questions. And, right, I'm gonna go back to the top of the order for you. And by way of context, we talked a little bit about the Biden administration's goal of deploying 30 gigawatts by 2030. That's a lot more than the 42 megawatts of offshore wind currently operating in the US. I'd like to give every panelist an opportunity to maybe highlight one or two either key actions or key barriers that is standing in the way that might prevent us from meeting that aggressive 2030 goal. And, right, we'll start with you and then we'll go to Andrea and John and Lauren and Habib in regular order. I think people need to get experience with offshore wind in a direct way that they can see what it is and what it isn't. And when something new is proposed, it's pretty natural for your first reaction to be kind of cautious. And you've seen a lot of that in everything from fisheries to right whale to navigation. And I think once there are some projects up and running, people will have more information, we're studying new projects pretty aggressively. Do you try to understand what impacts are? And I think I'm hoping that there's more comfort level after people see that. Am I next?  Thank you. Yeah, it's a great question. I think there's aggressive goals both at the federal level and the state level and we simply won't reach the goals of decarbonizing our grid without offshore wind. I think it's an incredible solution. While it's new in the United States, we are not reinventing the wheel. It's been heavily developed in the North Sea, which has similar conditions to the outer continental shelf. And also it's not that new in the US. We do have some of the smaller scale projects certainly throughout Massachusetts, which I think have been received overall really in a successful project. So I think there's that too. The other is, I mean, these are large infrastructure energy projects. So certainly on the transmission side, we're working with seasoned developers and operators. And you'll see a lot of the previous offshore oil and gas industry getting involved in offshore wind because it's very similar. Granted, the technology moving upward looks a bit different, but certainly a lot of the workforce and some of the supply chain can translate a bit. So I think while it's new, for sure, I think a lot of the previous existing infrastructure and industries can translate, which make it a little bit more approachable and digestible in the near term. Thanks, John. Well, we've hit on a lot of the really key goals, which would be, you know, obviously workforce development, transmission upgrades, ports upgrades and the necessary vessels. But if I were to throw two more out there to think about, it would be tier two and three manufacturers are gonna need capital and certification programs so that they can get their businesses up and running, certified and then supplying those larger tier one manufacturers. And then the other piece that I would throw out there would be the potential for more domestic steel sourcing. These projects require very thick, heavy plate steel. There is a plan for a new core to bring a facility online in Brandenburg, Kentucky at the end of this year. And we're really excited to see that they're gonna be supplying about 98% of the thickness grade of steel that is needed for the industry. But it would be really excellent if we could have another plant that could supplement that supply and be able to provide more domestic supply for the industry. Lauren. So from, you know, my workforce development point of view, I think keeping in mind regional collaboration between states is really key moving forward. And I'd like to see sort of support or platforms for that to kind of be enhanced over the next few years. The workforce, of course, is going to commute over state lines, especially where I am. Massachusetts is very close to its bordering states. So we really should be sharing, you know, and working together as we develop our skilled workforce for offshore wind. And secondly, I think Andrea really touched upon this as to John, but, you know, ramping up the manufacturing capability for the components for offshore wind would also increase a lot of the job opportunities available as these projects and, you know, advance in the next few years. So those are top of my mind. Thanks. And Habib, I'll give you the last word in this first lightning round. Oh, you're muted. Thinking about it from a technological perspective, the investment in building up our technological base in the US to look at next generation technologies that will drive costs out of these systems is so important. And the USDE plays a major role in that. So investment in the wind technology office and research and development is going to be critical for us to get there in the future. The other piece is as we encourage the development of innovative tech projects, floating projects on others, both on the east and west coast of the US. Other countries are doing that. They're developing what they call stepping stone projects in 150 to 200 megawatt range and providing tax incentives for these, if you wish, innovative projects will allow us to get there first ahead of the competition. We have time for, I think, one more lightning round. And John, I'm going to start with you for this one. And I'm going to offer an opportunity to help our audience understand what a successful offshore wind in this industry looks like in 2032. So we'll start with you and then maybe we'll go back and what we'll stay in the order. So we'll hear from Lauren and Habib and Wright and Andrea. But John, let me hear what your vision for 2032 looks like. Absolutely. Just from an actual hard infrastructure perspective, we'll be looking at hopefully 2,100 turbines, presuming that we've hit the 30 gigawatts by 2030 goal. That'll mean 6,800 miles of cable and approximately 30 vessels plus another 60 crew transfer vessels to be able to service and construct all these projects. That'll turn into somewhere in the ballpark of 13,000 to 50,000 jobs. That's a successful industry in my mind. Lauren, your perspective. So looking ahead, as I mentioned, obviously some manufacturing opportunities to enhance the workforce and the opportunities in offshore wind, but also a truly equitable rollout of the industry and seeing some of the sort of cities that are ready for revitalization and have kind of the geographic location and the people in the community that are ready and willing to join the workforce. So I think over the next 10 years, we'll see a great growth in that area. Habib? If I break up the 10 years into two slices, the first five and the next five, in the next five years, we hope that the US would deploy at least two floating demonstration farms in 150 to 250 megawatt range, one on the East Coast, one on the West Coast. And then by the end of the decade to have at least two floating ports, which are very different than fixed bottom ports in the US, and those are investments of a 250 megawatt range, a million dollar range. I would hope to see that happen by the end of the decade and be ready if you wish to have developed a supply chain in the US so that by, when the next wave of offshore wind energy, which will be floating happens in the 2030s, we're ready for that. Right? I'd say success would be that we've got some large scale projects that are built. Hopefully we've met our 2030 goals, there's a supply chain that's looking toward the kind of second generation of projects. On the leasing front, we're gonna be looking at deeper and deeper water because some of the near shore areas will have been taken. So those are looking toward, and then there's a whole slew of additional challenges that we need to look at when we're going further and further offshore, like different transmission issues, HVDC. So that's what I'd be thinking. And Andrea, you get last word because you helped me out with that assist when my zoom crashed, so that's your reward. Oh, thank you so much. I mean, I'll echo everyone else's notes that they're incredibly critical. I would say, New Jersey is scheduled to have or at least one, if not three projects up and running by 2032. So that will be very exciting to see. So port development, marshaling development, manufacturing development, so really bringing the supply chain that's existed in Europe over here and getting it up and running. So ultimately, a strong workforce with new experts in offshore wind development, education, training programs and really teaching that next generation how to take this new budding industry, hand it off to them so it's up and running to really see future development. That's great. That is all extremely interesting and actually very hopeful. We have to make lots of stuff and be able to make it here and move it around, but it's all doable. And so that's a great way to wrap up the panel. We're a little over, I'm sorry about that, but let me do a couple of things. First is to thank our fabulous panelists, right? Andrea, John who unfortunately had a commitment. So he's no longer with us on the screen, but John, Lauren and Habib, thank you for being fantastic panelists. Such an interesting topic and kind of I think kind of a favorite interest of a lot of us here at EFI. So we were all really looking forward to today and couldn't have been a better way to close out our scaling up innovation to drive down emissions briefing series. Also like to thank everyone at EFI behind the scenes who helps make this possible. Dan O'Brien, Omri, Emma, Allison, Anna, Savannah and Molly, tons and tons of work went into this briefing, but also the entire series and having it all work back and forth with our living with climate change series. That's a lot of coordination and lots of heavy duty thinking and planning. So thanks to everybody who made those contributions possible. We also couldn't do this without our four fabulous interns, Christina, Stephanie, Abbey and Nathan who help us with the notes and with the briefing notices and the website and the Twitter and the everything. So thanks to all of their contributions as well. My colleague Dan O'Brien is gonna put a survey up real quick. If anyone has two minutes and you're willing to help us out by filling out our survey, we read every response to great help. Did you have any AV issues? Were there any audio issues? Do you have ideas for future panels or future topics? Please let us know. It really does mean a lot when people take the survey and it really does help us out quite a lot as well. We're a couple of minutes over. So we're gonna go ahead and conclude there. We will be back in July with some bonus installments of both of our briefing series, which is very exciting. Those are TBD, at least in terms of dates and time. And so sign up for Climate Change Solutions. That's our news bi-weekly newsletter. It's the best way to stay up to date. We are also within 30 days of the Congressional Clean Energy Expo Policy Forum. That's gonna be happening on Monday, July 25th. And so again, we have been starting to get the word out about that, but that's gonna be really excellent, really cool panels, really great speakers and really some really great involvement by the Leadership House and Senate Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Caucuses. So keep an eye out for that. I wish everyone a happy Wednesday and a great holiday weekend. And we will be back in a couple of weeks with our next bonus installments. And until then, thanks so much for joining us today.


Hello everyone, I'm Alicia Woodruff and welcome to the Fort Report. I'm having a 70s disco flashback because it's time to get funky. Okay, not really. You can leave the polyester in the closet. But it is time for some funky fun at the 5th annual Funky Fine Spring Fling. Well, what is Funky Fines? It started as a way for Jessica Doherty to introduce everyone to all the cool, hand-crafted knick-knacks and treasures she wrote about in her Funky Fines blog. And the rest is Funky History. People contacted us wanting to advertise on the site, sponsor giveaways, and then we would go to events. But all the events that were indie art and craft shows were held in Dallas or Austin. And we really saw that Fort Worth had a need for that. And we thought, you know, why don't we host an event, have a Funky Fines event. And this will be our eighth craft show in Fort Worth. It will feature over 120 different artists, crafters and designers selling all kinds of unique handmade items. Everybody's so unique, everything anybody could want. There really is something for everybody. Not only will you have fun shopping, but you're helping out local organizations. We have each vendor is donated at one raffle item that they've handmade. And so raffle tickets are $1. And all the money, all the proceeds will go to the Humane Society and the cost that we split it 50-50. The Humane Society will host a pet adoption on site all weekend. And it doesn't stop there. The event is also pet friendly. So a lot of shoppers like to bring their dogs on a leash and just, you know, enjoy getting out and doing something with the family that they can bring their pet along as well. Funky Fines Spring Fling is March 9th and 10th at the Will Rogers Memorial Center. The event is free and you can get discount parking at the Harley Lott if you print the coupon off their website. Just visit the Funky Fines website or their Facebook page. Spring is near and that means cleaning time. This year's Cowtown Great American Cleanup is April 6th and organizers are expecting about 4,000 volunteers to come out to help clean up Fort Worth. They're allowed to clean up at their school, their church, their neighborhoods. So we'll have people in one of the 12 city locations and then we'll have other people cleaning up probably about another 150 locations all over Fort Worth. The first 4,000 people who register receive t-shirts, trash bags, and gloves, so early registration is definitely recommended. And if you miss the cleanup, you're still invited to the Earth Party afterward in Sundance Square. After the cleanup, all the volunteers and the entire city of Fort Worth is invited to what we're calling our Earth Party. From 11 to 2, we're going to have entertainment and booths about living greener in Fort Worth so it'll be an event that folks won't want to miss. Keep America Beautiful has folks all over the United States participating in this Great American Cleanup. So Fort Worth has our own version with the Cowtown Cleanup, so come on out and show your civic pride and help keep Fort Worth beautiful. Here's a look at other events happening in and around Fort Worth over the next few weeks. For a listing of more events and city meetings, you can always check the calendar at the city's website.