Offshore Wind Energy in New Jersey: Adventures at Recharge Academy
Unveiling the World of Offshore Wind Energy
REcharge Academy? What is that?
Welcome to Recharge Academy, where we explored the fascinating world of Offshore Wind Energy in New Jersey. I had an incredible experience at the REcharge Academy, from July 31st to August 3rd, 2023.
Picture around 100 professionals hailing from all corners of the nation – teachers, librarians, career readiness wizards, nonprofit champs, researchers, and curriculum designers. The Recharge Academy, a flagship educator training program, is orchestrated by Michael Arquin and his KidWind crew. With support from the NJ Economic Development Authority and the buzz of excitement surrounding offshore wind energy on the East Coast, our focus was on all things wind technology with its challenges and benefits. Headquartered at Stockton University – Atlantic City, we embarked on a whirlwind tour that combined expert lectures, energy facility tours, and hands-on activities.
During four jam-packed days, we delved into the political implications, the science of renewable tech, and the economics behind it all. The engaging classroom activities were designed to be easily differentiated to the level and needs of the particular classroom.
In this Article...
Why am I talking about this on my blog? What does this have to do with Ungrading? At the surface, nothing. It’s just cool, and it was a great experience that I’d like to share. But yet… it’s hugely important. The effects of climate change are in the news and need to be addressed. New Jersey has climate standards that I need to address in my classroom. The technology involved is rapidly progressing. These topics are meaningful to students, and especially so for females. If I want to capture their imaginations, I need to incorporate this into my curriculum. In the back of my mind, the question persists: Can I use the Learning Progression Method to assess their learning of this material?
In this blog post, I will begin by presenting some of the highlights of the week. Then I will discuss the implications for my physics program and assessment approach. Why should you care? I think that there are 2 reasons: (1) climate standards run throughout almost every curriculum and if you are anything like me, there are likely big gaps in your knowledge, and (2) we want to make sure that any new curriculum is aligned with and can fit into our assessment approach. Read on! I think you’ll like it!
New Jersey's Clean Energy Vision
New Jersey – where I teach – has its sights locked on a clean energy utopia by 2035. We’re projecting a colossal 11 GW of offshore wind by 2040. Back in 2019, the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities (NJBPU) approved Ørsted’s Ocean Wind project – 1,100 MW of wind power, 15 miles off the coast of Atlantic City. That’s like plugging into Mother Nature’s charger, and it’s expected to fire up in 2024, bringing a cool $1.17 billion in economic benefits and 15,000 jobs over the 20-year life of the project. The second solicitation in September 2020 awarded 2648 MW to Atlantic Shores, which more than tripled the State’s committed capacity. The state’s commitment to clean energy is charted in the table below (Figure 1).
To put this in perspective, the first two contracts alone, totalling 3758 MW, will generate enough clean energy to power 1.15 million homes.
Why so much in New Jersey? New Jersey’s coastal ocean provides some of the world’s most advantageous conditions for offshore wind development, including prime wind resources, favorable ocean seabed and depth, and proximity to large population centers (NJ Offshore Wind Strategic Plan, 2020). Leveraging these conditions to achieve 7,500 MW of offshore wind energy by 2035 is a critical element of meeting the state’s goal of 100% clean energy by 2050, which is a necessary step in addressing a changing climate.
The characteristics that make New Jersey’s coastal ocean ideal for offshore wind also contribute to a distinctive ocean environment with many important and sensitive natural resources. New Jersey leaders and stakeholders have expressed a desire to protect these resources while developing this renewable energy source for the environmental and economic benefits it assures. The NJ Offshore Wind Strategic Plan takes into account environmental and natural resource protection, commercial and recreational fisheries, supply chain and workforce development, ports and harbors, energy markets and transmission.
Did you know that it takes 10 years from proposal to award to research to construction to completion? It’s a huge upfront investment on the part of the companies. The benefits to the state of NJ are tremendous, including major port development at three different facilities. Besides the 7,000 full and or part time jobs and $3.5 billion in economic benefits, the project developers will also contribute $26 million ($10,000 per MW) to fund research initiatives and wildlife and fishery monitoring in the region. New Jersey is headed to become the number one provider of Offshore Wind Energy (OWE, for short).
Exploring Offshore Wind Technology
New offshore wind turbines are HUGE, with single blades stretching as long as a football field! The tower? It’s like a skyscraper at 780 feet tall, and those blades? They carve out a circle with a diameter of over 1,000 feet wide! New Jersey has optimal offshore winds. And the wind itself is free! The technology for capturing it is not, obviously, but the wind is present for our use if we can just implement safe ways to capture its energy.
Offshore wind technology is improving so quickly that wind developers are reworking construction plans on the fly to account for the next generation of bigger, more powerful wind turbines. Monopiles are the go-to method for fixing a wind turbine to the sea bed because the waters of the Atlantic coast are shallow enough to support their construction (Casey, 2020). They are also developing designs for floating turbines, so they can be set further out to shore. These floating turbines have the advantage of accessing stronger and more consistent wind resources compared to fixed-bottom turbines. However, while the technology is promising, it is still evolving and faces challenges related to cost, maintenance, and environmental impact that need to be addressed to make it more optimal for widespread use. So all of the leasing areas are currently close enough to take advantage of the monopile technology.
Location, Location, Location!
We heard from 4 professionals: Ms. Reynolds of Atlantic Shores & Ms. Fontana of Invenergy in the morning to get the corporate viewpoint and from Dr. Josh Kohut & Dr. Daphne Monroe of Rutgers to get a more environmental, academic viewpoint. I first want to note how impressively qualified all of these people were, with expertise in a wide variety of subject areas and amazing job experience. They were all passionate about their subject areas and deeply knowledgeable about the benefits and challenges posed by OWE in their areas. They freely acknowledged what they didn’t know. The regulations, research and technology are all transforming so rapidly that it is a dynamic and challenging space in which to work.
Figure 2 shows the lease areas for OWE in NJ. These locations, as well as the specific destination of individual turbines within the area, are carefully sited to thoughtfully balance economically viable offshore wind development locations with other marine activities and infrastructure. There is a long list of constraints that include avoiding shipping activity, wildlife, military areas, fisheries, and poor soil conditions. At the same time, they must optimize areas of high wind speed, shallow water depths, and short distance to shore.
There are also considerations surrounding laying the cable that will bring the energy from the wind farm to land. Again, the list of constraints is daunting, ranging from environmental impacts to technical feasibility to political and regulatory influence to community/tribal nation impacts. Offshore to landfall to onshore routing of the cable, reducing these impacts, requires longitudinal studies and input from a wide variety of experts and stakeholders. I would not want to be in their shoes, personally!
Learning the Science
The physical aspects of the ocean – currents, temperatures, the interaction between atmosphere and water – are a dynamic system that supports life as we know it. Scientists are measuring all the attributes of the ocean before, during and after the construction of the wind turbines. This provides useful data to create models that can effectively predict changes or design solutions to ameliorate negative effects. Working closely with the shellfish industry, researchers also collect baseline data in order to study the effects of OWE installations. The shellfish (specifically clams) are a huge economic product of NJ, and the windfarms overlap those harvesting areas. The fishermen and researchers together are proactively addressing issues of navigation, invasive species, displacement, and more.
There was so much more that I learned:
We delved into the intricacies of the power grid and the unique challenges arising from the organization of the U.S. grid and the revenue models of power companies.
We learned about wind turbines and how they generate electricity, the rapidly falling costs, the types of turbines, and the factors that affect their power. There were formulas! Math! And graphs! These were things I can use in my classes..
Career opportunities: We also listened to a panel of very impressive speakers from various industries including offshore wind companies such as Oersted and Atlantic Shores as well as a representative from the Merchant Marines.
Model Wind Turbine Activities
I could go into a lot of detail about all of the activities that we did, but I will limit it to a summary. Most of these activities can be found for free on KidWind’s website, with more being developed by teachers (myself included) over the next year
- Given a bag of readily available and inexpensive materials (straws, dowels, paper plates, string, duct tape, etc) we needed to create a turbine that would raise as much mass as possible using the power of a fan. We made the one shown in the photo in 1 hour. It worked, but man, I wanted more time to make it better!
- We did a great little activity where we built a simple windmill with a pencil, generator, and “Firefly” nacelle. A worksheet walked us through the conversions necessary to place the model at the same distance to scale as the current wind farms are set to be located. My 20 cm model was 0.00133 times the height of an actual 150 m tall wind turbine. The wind farm will be located 16 km off the coast of NJ so I set it 32 paces away from my starting position. I could barely see it (see Figure 10 below).
- We built a model wind turbine using the Kidwind Advanced Wind Turbine kits. I didn’t have nearly enough time to play with this. I could have spent the entire day testing all of the variables, creating more complex blades, adding gears, etc. They had the competition testing all set up, with the wind tunnel and sensors. The challenge is to generate the maximum energy in 30 seconds. I didn’t do so well, only earning 0.1 W with my long blades. My excuse was that I only got to build for short periods of time!
Other Activities
In addition to the turbine activities, there were at least a dozen other types of games, experiments, and experiences. We had a lot of choices, and I had a difficulty time choosing!
- Building a mini-circuit out of batteries, cloth conducting tape and other crafts materials to represent a neighborhood’s electric grid.
- The “Stakeholders” game was directed towards upper elementary and lower middle school students. In spite of that, I found it to be interesting to learn more about the dozen different roles. I think it is an activity easily adaptable to high school students, with or without the role playing aspect.
- We went inside a life-sized, inflated model whale to get a lesson in the anatomy of whales. Middle aged me was as excited and impressed as middle school me would have been! Did you know that baleen whales scoop up water with fish in it, then squoosh all the water OUT of the baleen, then swallowing the solids that remain? I did not. I am not sure what I thought happened, but it wasn’t that! Cynde, from 7 Seas Whale Watch, first gave a short introduction that specifically addressed the recent reporting of whale deaths. More about this later.
- I went to Advanced Generators, which was not dissimilar to an activity I already do in class. However, it definitely took things to the next level, providing me with formulas, ways to quantitatively assess the generators, and produce larger more reliable models.
- The idea of a public utility that is market based is uniquely challenging. I chose to attend the Energy Market Game, which was a complicated but effective way to learn how we buy and sell electricity. I don’t know if this is something I would do in my classroom, but I absolutely learned a lot from participating.
- On the final day, there were 2 field trips, one to Atlantic City’s Utilities Authority and the other to the new manufacturing port at Paulsboro, NJ.
Misinformation about Offshore Wind Energy
I just want to present two of the issues here, both of which have been in the news. While it might be disinformation stirred up from the oil and gas industry, I will assume that these are honest errors from concerned citizens.
One of the major complaints from the community is “ruining the view” from the beaches. Wind turbines will be located 12.5 miles (or more) offshore. The firefly activity had us calculate the distance (to scale) and place my model the scale distance away, here’s what it looked like:
You see that little blue speck? (It’s directly along the line at the bottom of the trunk of the tree in the center of the photo.) That’s it. Now, imagine that little blue speck as white, on a white or light blue background… it will be nearly impossible to see. Even further because the blades are long and thin, not short and round like this toy. And this is without taking into account the curvature of the Earth’s surface, which will reduce its height further. A pretty nifty demonstration in my opinion!
The visual impact of offshore wind turbines can vary based on several factors, including their distance from the shore, their size, and the design of the wind farm. Wind farm developers often work to minimize the visual impact through careful planning, such as locating wind farms further offshore and selecting turbine designs that blend into the seascape more effectively.
The whale demonstration described above helped us to better understand that federal agencies and experts have consistently found no substantiated connection between wind farms and whale deaths. However, despite this scientific consensus, there have been instances of false claims and misinformation perpetuated by certain lawmakers, the fossil fuel industry, and select news sources. According to experts, factors such as ship strikes, shifting ocean temperatures, and potentially viral infections are more likely contributors to the unfortunate occurrences of whale deaths. “At this point, there is no scientific evidence that noise resulting from offshore wind site characterization surveys could potentially cause mortality of whales. There are no known links between recent large whale mortalities and ongoing offshore wind surveys” (NOAA, 2023). Figure 10 shows the number of whale deaths in states down the east coast from 2016 – 2023.
These deaths are awful, and agencies are monitoring these “unusual mortality events” closely. “Partial or full necropsy examinations were conducted on approximately half of the whales. Of the whales examined (approximately 90), about 40 percent had evidence of human interaction, either ship strike or entanglement” (NOAA, 2023). In addition to these studies, NJ has no offshore wind farms as of yet, so I don’t see how we can blame them for these events.
I am not trying to say that there are zero consequences for building offshore wind farms. Of course there will be. However, it’s important to note that offshore wind farm developers, in conjunction with New Jersey, are working to address the concerns through careful project planning, impact assessments, and stakeholder engagement. Balancing the benefits of clean energy generation with these concerns is a key challenge in the development of offshore wind energy.
Overall, I learned so much background, little to none of which I knew before. I am a NJ resident and a science teacher. I read the news regularly, so why am I so ill informed? There is not nearly enough proactive positive press on this!
Overall Experience
One of the great things about this program is how well taken care of we were. Michael and his team thought of EVERYTHING. They fed us well, gave us plenty of options for every step from housing, to choices of programming. I felt treated like a professional the entire time. He was genuinely interested in our needs and our opinions, and smiled continuously. He never seemed frazzled or frustrated, and took the inevitable hiccups in stride. He was respectful of our time, kept things moving, provided breaks, and made us laugh. Modest and cheerful despite the responsibilities he was shouldering, he addressed each question with equanimity and full attention. They provided social opportunities at dinner each evening. All of the other activity leaders were informative, helpful, and truly kind, as well as knowledgeable and experienced. I was seriously impressed with the entire operation.
Educational Implications
Here are my main takeaways from the week:
- Offshore wind energy is worth investing in, because the amount of available power is enormous and so far, seems worth the tradeoffs. It’s not like fossil fuels are doing us any good. And if we are not willing to cut back on our energy use, then we need to find alternative ways of generating it that do not contribute to climate change. WIll there be other consequences? Of course. But given the even-handed and thorough approaches being applied, I can give the benefit of the doubt to the good intentions of the stakeholders involved. They are looking to ameliorate any negative impacts. Meanwhile the fight is on.
- Educators need to be well informed about renewable energy for several reasons.
- There are huge gaps in our workforce and we need to let kids know about them.
- Women are much more likely to get involved in science and engineering when the careers have a social impact, making the world a better place. Offshore wind is just one of the many areas that has that effect.
- We need to disseminate factual information.
- It is a perfect medium to teach a wide range of skills and content, ranging across the curriculum.
- There are educators across the United States who are eager to learn, who care deeply about their students, and despite the difficulties, show up to make schools work. I met people from North Dakota, Minnesota, Louisiana, Connecticut, and Alabama to name a few states. Everyone’s story was different, yet on a fundamental level, the same. We are all seeking the same thing in the end: a way to give students what they need to have a good learning experience, to support their goals.
Educational Opportunities
My commitment moving forward is to incorporate the invaluable insights from Recharge Academy into my educational approach. As I continue to be an active participant in this organization, I am eager to begin by introducing some simple yet illuminating activities into my classroom. On the very first day of school, I distributed handheld generators, motors, and propellers to student pairs, challenging them to set the propellers in motion. Through this hands-on experiment, we explored the dynamics of wind power: what influences its speed, how direction is controlled, and much more. Over the coming weeks, as we delve into the realm of DC Circuits, we will revisit this activity, allowing students to dig deeper into the practical application of their knowledge. Moreover, I intend to harness the power grid activity as a culminating unit project.
As a physics educator, integrating wind power into my curriculum aligns with my teaching ethos. While time constraints often pose a challenge, I can continue to use my 10 Practices. Because my assessment focuses on skills, weaving renewable energy concepts into my lessons will not cause any change in my grading approach. By doing so, I can seamlessly incorporate New Jersey’s climate change standards into traditional physics content. My students will have the opportunity to apply their understanding of energy, forces, and circuits to the intricate world of wind energy generation and turbine functionality.
The OWELs Cohort and Clean Energy
Clean Energy/Bright Futures is building a national network of Clean Energy Leaders who center student learning and local educational needs for implementation of clean energy STEM curricula and programs. These leaders in turn connect with the energy resources, utilities, energy-related companies, and local career pathways in each community. KidWind is partnering with Clean Energy to launch a cohort of Offshore Wind Energy Leaders (OWELs) in NJ. I am going to participate as a member of the OWELs cohort this year, testing activities and collaborating with 9 other NJ colleagues plus Iain Sterry, the STEM Engagement and Training Manager. I am really looking forward to this program, which involves reviewing and refining offshore wind curriculum and assisting with the dissemination of resources across the state. This will, in turn, support me in my own classroom.
Conclusion
In today’s rapidly evolving technological landscape, the potential for positive change is boundless. It is imperative that we nurture a strong and interconnected community to facilitate the dissemination of accurate information and the rejection of misinformation. We need positive, coherent and proactive approaches like REcharge Academy, that bring more stakeholders together. Adequate funding is vital to sustain this progress.
As I step back into my classroom, armed with newfound wisdom and innovative teaching methods, I am poised to empower my students with knowledge and enthusiasm for renewable energy. REcharge Academy was not just an event; it might be a transformative movement and a launchpad for constructive change. Our world yearns for more gatherings like this – spaces where stakeholders converge, ideas flourish, and the foundation for a brighter tomorrow is laid.
You do not have to be a science teacher to incorporate this information into your program! I met all sorts of educators, at all levels of schooling, from all over the country. If this post has ignited your curiosity, I encourage you to explore the possibility of participating in this extraordinary experience next summer. It comes with my highest recommendation and is undeniably worth the time and effort investment.
References
“2016–2023 Humpback Whale Unusual Mortality Event Along The Atlantic Coast”. NOAA, 2023, https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/national/marine-life-distress/2016-2023-humpback-whale-unusual-mortality-event-along-atlantic-coast. Accessed 2 Sept 2023.
“BOEM To Review Six Wind Lease Areas Offshore New York And New Jersey”. Workboat.Com, 2023, https://www.workboat.com/wind/boem-to-review-six-wind-lease-areas-offshore-new-york-and-new-jersey. Accessed 4 Aug 2023.
Casey, Tina. “Shazam! Garden State Transforms Self Into Offshore Wind Superhero”. Cleantechnica, 2020, https://cleantechnica.com/2020/12/23/shazam-garden-state-transforms-self-into-500-million-offshore-wind-giant/. Accessed 4 Aug 2023.
“Frequent Questions—Offshore Wind And Whales”. NOAA, 2023, https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/new-england-mid-atlantic/marine-life-distress/frequent-questions-offshore-wind-and-whales. Accessed 1 Sept 2023.
“New Jersey Offshore Wind Solicitations | NJ OCE Web Site”. Njcleanenergy.Com, 2023, https://www.njcleanenergy.com/renewable-energy/programs/nj-offshore-wind/solicitations#:~:text=These%20awards%20were%20the%20result,MW%20to%20Ocean%20Wind%20II. Accessed 4 Aug 2023.
“Offshore Wind – NJEDA”. NJEDA, 2023, https://www.njeda.gov/offshorewind/. Accessed 3 Aug 2023.
Rodas, Steven. NJ Advance Media for NJ.com. (2023, May 3). Are more dead whales washing up? A look at the numbers from the past 20 years. www.nj.com. https://www.nj.com/news/2023/01/are-more-dead-whales-washing-up-a-look-at-the-numbers-from-the-past-20-years.html
