UMaine Offshore Wind Project Featured in Real Clear Politics Article
The University of Maine’s offshore wind project was the focus of the Real Clear Politics article, “Offshore wind power’s promising but complicated future.” The article mentioned the first successful year of VolturnUS, a prototype that’s one-eighth the scale of a full-size offshore wind turbine that was deployed off the coast of Castine. VolturnUS was created by the UMaine-led DeepCwind Consortium. Habib Dagher, director of the Advanced Structures and Composites Center at UMaine, spoke about the turbine’s first year. “We’ve had excellent results with the program,” he said. “The unit is essentially a floating laboratory — there are 60 sensors on it that measure the motion of the unit, stresses in the unit. We compared the data to our predictive models and it turned out very accurate.”