(Source: Bangor Daily News (Bangor, Maine))By Bill Trotter, Bangor Daily News, Maine
Oct. 19–NORTHPORT, Maine — If there really are answers blowing in the wind, several dozen scientists, regulators and energy industry officials hoped to draw closer to them as they gathered Tuesday at a local conference center.
The event, held at Point Lookout, was billed as the first Maine Deepwater Offshore Wind Conference. It attracted University of Maine and other state officials, environmental researchers, engineers and private industry representatives who wanted to learn more about the Deep C Wind Consortium’s offshore wind research and development efforts.
“No one else is doing it,” Peter Vigue, chairman and CEO of Pittsfield-based Cianbro Corp., told more than 200 people who attended the conference. “We can be the first.”
The Deep C Wind Consortium consists of more than three dozen universities, government agencies, private companies and nonprofit organizations that hope to attract significant offshore wind development investment to the state. If it succeeds, state and federal officials have said, it could result in as much as $20 billion being invested in Maine and 15,000 wind energy-related jobs being created.
So far, the consortium has received more than $25 million in public funding, much of it going toward construction of a key component of the collaborative research effort.
UMaine’s Offshore Wind Laboratory, which is under construction next to the university’s Advanced Structures and Composites Center in Orono, is projected to cost $17.4 million, $12.4 million of which has been funded through a federal grant with the rest coming from state funds. Construction is expected to be complete by May 2011.
According to UMaine officials, the 37,000-square-foot facility will include chambers capable of reproducing many of the natural conditions found in the Gulf of Maine, such as extreme temperature and humidity levels and even briny fog. The lab also will include a reinforced concrete test stand moored to bedrock that will allow consortium researchers to test turbine components such as composite material blades up to 70 meters in length.
But there’s a lot of other work being done related to offshore wind research besides the Orono construction project, consortium officials said Tuesday. Over a series of categorized sessions that ran from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., conference attendees were briefed on ongoing environmental and engineering studies.
