Lower-Cost, Offshore Wind Power

through the sharing and application of scientific, engineering and economic knowledge and innovation from across the U.S.

Mission

The mission of the Offshore Wind Innovation Center is to increase fundamental scientific, engineering and economic knowledge and innovation, as a Maryland-based Research Center of Excellence, to lower the cost of commercializing offshore wind in Maryland and enable a successful offshore wind industry in the United States.

History

Founded on August 2, 2016, the Offshore Wind Innovation Center builds upon existing computational and experimental work initially funded by the State of Maryland under their MOWER program, as well as related federal grants from NSF/DOE/DOD, and maintains close ties with the Business Network for Offshore Wind through their membership activities, including the Innovation and Commercialization Committee.

Center Activities

Call for Poster Presentations for the 2018 International Partnering Forum (IPF-18)

OWIC is organizing a research poster session as part of IPF-18.  If you are interested in submitting a poster describing research results relevant to offshore wind energy for consideration for the IPF-18 poster session, please go here.

International
Workshops on Life-Cycle Costing of Offshore Wind Turbines and Farms

The center sponsors an annual international workshop on life-cycle costing of offshore wind turbines and farms.  The workshop brings together experts on forecasting life-cycle costs of turbines, wind farms, and their associated infrastructure.

Windfarms -- 2016

This colloquium intends to bring together wind-farm researchers from different disciplines to present their work on design, operation, and control of large wind farms. This may include studies on wake interaction, turbulence, wind-farm boundary-layer interaction, as well as control and integration in the electricity grid, market behavior, etc.

Business Network for Offshore Wind Partnering Forums

The Business Network for Offshore Wind connects industry to opportunity. More than 75 businesses strong – working together to learn, connect, and participate in the global and regional offshore wind market.

Current Research Focus Areas

WINDINSPIRE is an NSF-supported international collaboration that addresses, primarily through computer simulations, the pressing research questions that arise when adding inherently intermittent wind sources to power systems.
U-SPARC collects offshore wind and atmospheric measurements to reduce energy yield uncertainties that contribute to sub-optimal offshore wind farm performance and unintended high costs.
Cost-effective operation & maintenance for offshore wind turbines and wind farms addresses the life-cycle costs of sustaining turbines and farms. This work includes the optimization of maintenance, system health management, and the formulation of power purchase agreements.
Multi-turbine floating
platforms
and other alternative configurations
Offshore wind farm layout
to minimize turbine interference and optimize resource usage
Impact on marine life
Education and training,
including design for the Collegiate Wind Challenge
Long-duration UAV for automated offshore wind farm inspection
Wind farm control concepts
for power output optimization for a range of grid services (e.g. bulk power, kinetic energy reserves, frequency regulation)
Co-optimization of wind
farms and storage for improving grid efficiency
Grid integration studies
Increased turbine efficiency and durability to minimize weight
Economic analysis and
market designs

The potential wind power off the u.s. coasts is 4x the CAPACITY of the current electric grid

While wind resource potential is typically given in gigawatts (GW), one GW of wind power will supply between 225,000 to 300,000 average U.S. homes with power annually.  NREL estimate a gross wind power resource of 4,223 GW off the coast of the United States, which is roughly four times the generating capacity of the current U.S. electric grid.

Members