LSU Civil & Environmental Engineering Professor, Team Studying Impacts of Offshore Wind Technology
August 15, 2024
BATON ROUGE, LA – In October of last year, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management announced it had finalized four Wind Energy Areas (WEAs) in the Gulf of Mexico that could support offshore wind projects with the potential to produce enough clean, renewable energy to power more than 3 million homes.
To produce that energy, it is imperative that researchers develop critical floating offshore wind technology, but what are the environmental impacts of this technology and how we do ensure its efficiency?
LSU Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) Associate Professor Chao Sun and a team of researchers are working to answer these questions, focusing on floating offshore wind turbines, or FOWTs, to understand how they perform under operational conditions and in the face of extreme weather conditions like hurricanes. The project is funded by a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation.
“We aim to understand how FOWTs perform under operational conditions and whether their dynamic stability will be maintained or lost under extreme conditions, e.g., major hurricanes,” Sun said. “We will implement meteorological and regional ocean models to understand the comprehensive impacts of these FOWTs on local and regional climates and ocean environments.
“Numerous existing references indicate that land-based wind farms can affect local or regional climate to a certain extent. It is anticipated that large-scale FOWTs will change both atmospheric circulations and moisture transport and impact the short- and/or long-term microclimates. Consequently, the nutrient distribution, water quality, and productivity in the ocean ecosystem will be altered. However, how the FOWTs impact the climatic and oceanic environments remains unclear. Therefore, in this research, we aim to advance the understanding of the comprehensive environmental impacts of FOWTs.”
Sun is joined on this project by LSU CEE Associate Professor Celalettin Ozdemir, LSU Oceanography & Coastal Sciences (OCS) Assistant Professor Paul Miller, LSU OCS Associate Professor Jun-Hong Liang, and North Carolina State University Computer Science Associate Professor Xu Liu.
As this project develops, Sun said that the data will be openly available and shared with the offshore wind and natural hazard research community. Insight gleaned from the project could help the offshore wind industry to reduce costs associated with design, installation, operation, maintenance, and decommissioning to minimize the life cycle cost and environmental impacts.
Additionally, undergraduate and graduate students will be engaged in this research and data from the project will be incorporated into course materials. Future plans also include a new course at LSU on offshore wind and clean energy that will be accessible online for students at other universities.
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Contact: Joshua Duplechain
Director of Communications
225-578-5706
josh@lsu.edu