Northeastern to lead Phase II of NOWRDC Offshore Wind Hurricane Risk Assessment Project

Led by Professor Andrew Myers, CDM Smith Professor and Department Chair Jerome Hajjar, and Research Associate Professor Nathan Post, a team of five universities will begin Phase II of the project “Long-Term Availability and Bankability of Offshore Wind Through hurricane Risk Assessment and Mitigation,” administered by the National Offshore Wind Research and Development Consortium (NOWRDC) with sponsorship from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities, and the Maryland Energy Administration. The team for Phase II of this project includes researchers from Northeastern, UMass Amherst, Clemson University, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Maine. Including both phases, this projects spans four years and has a $1.3M budget.

Offshore wind has long been viewed as a critical component of a successful green energy transition for the United States. The renewable resource is abundant off the coast of the Eastern Seaboard, with the National Renewable Energy laboratory estimating that there exists enough untapped energy to power the entire country. However, turbine towers in this part of the world face a distinct threat – wind and waves from powerful hurricanes rising from the Atlantic basin. “With most of the established offshore wind farms having been designed for the waters off Europe, there exists design uncertainty for maintaining the structural integrity of offshore wind energy infrastructure against hurricane forces,” said Myers.

In Phase I, the researchers studied 12 sites located off the U.S. mid/north Atlantic coast and, for these sites, found that (1) the risk of collapse of monopile foundations due to hurricanes is lower than what is internationally accepted for other power-generating infrastructure and for other offshore oil and gas infrastructure, industries which have been established for many decades, (2) the widely-used design condition of a sustained hub-height wind speed of 57 m/s (128 mph) will occur rarely with a mean return period of several centuries for a 15-MW turbine, and (3) the designs of the monopile foundations are controlled by fatigue, a loading that accumulates gradually over the 30-year lifetime of an offshore wind turbine, meaning that the monopile foundations are more robust than required with respect to storm loading, including hurricanes.

The team will expand these calculations to include more scenarios during Phase II. According to a release from NOWRDC, Phase II will “assess potential climate effects, alternative ways in which hurricanes could cause structural risk to offshore wind including blade failure, and potential hurricane impacts to grid resiliency.”