Jerome Hajjar Leading Hurricane Resiliency Project for the National Offshore Wind Research and Development Consortium
GRI Faculty Affiliate, CEE Chair, and CDM Smith Professor, Jerome Hajjar, will lead a multi-university $650K grant from the National Offshore Wind Research and Development Consortium for “Ensuring Long-Term Availability and Bankability of Offshore Wind Through Hurricane Risk Assessment and Mitigation.”
Relatively little technical research has been devoted to quantifying and assessing risk of Atlantic coast hurricanes to offshore wind. Developers, regulators, and insurers have limited tools to quantify the risks or determine whether meaningful design changes are necessary to manage the risk.
“We expect this proposal to remove a significant amount of the uncertainty associated with conjectures about hurricane risk with a targeted, industry-driven series of investigations that span from basic atmospheric science to highly applied OSW engineering,” says Professor Hajjar.
The National Offshore Wind Research and Development Consortium was established in 2018 when the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) was awarded $18.5 million from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to administer a public-private partnership focused on advancing offshore wind technology in the United States. NYSERDA contributed matching funds. The Consortium, a not-for-profit organization, supports cost-effective and responsible development of offshore wind to maximize economic benefits to the United States. The Commonwealths of Virginia and Massachusetts and the states of Maine and Maryland now also contribute to the Consortium’s funding.