Planning Grant: Engineering Research Center for Offshore Wind Energy Center for Infrastructure Resilience, Control, Innovation, and Transmission (OWE-CIRCIT)

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The Planning Grants for Engineering Research Centers competition was run as a pilot solicitation within the ERC program. Planning grants are not required as part of the full ERC competition, but intended to build capacity among teams to plan for convergent, center-scale engineering research.The Offshore Wind Energy (OWE) industry in Europe is booming, and has reduced electricity generation costs to less than $0.10 per kWh. The U.S. OWE resource is enormous, and could provide 10-20 times the national need for electricity. The U.S. is just starting to develop this resource, does not yet have an industrial supply chain for OWE, and there are unique U.S. challenges because of hurricanes, complex seabed conditions, and grid integration. In order to address these challenges, and to design resilient and cost-effective heavy OWE infrastructure (e.g., structures, transmission system), a convergent approach is needed. Failure for the U.S. to take this approach, to plan accordingly, to maximize continuous learning, and to take disruption actions when needed, would be a hugely missed opportunity for society to benefit from the breadth of U.S. expertise and knowhow, and to make technological advancements that have broad applications. This ERC planning grant project will bring together those with relevant expertise in OWE from several engineering disciplines, fields of science, the national laboratories, state and federal resource management agencies, industrial stakeholders, and developers; as well as those from affected coastal communities. This group will design a data-driven multi-disciplinary system-level framework that identifies where advances are needed to build a resilient infrastructure (blades, turbine, support structure, transmission grid, standards, and models) that would enable a large and responsible level of OWE to be harvested. The technical areas to be integrated together in this frame will include but are not limited to metocean characterization (wind, waves, currents), composite materials, aerodynamic modeling, geo-engineering parameters, stability, fatigue, corrosion, inspection, control, renewable energy integration, social acceptance of OWE development, and impact on marine and coastal ecosystems.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.