S9E2: Can Maine become a global pioneer in renewable energy and infrastructure?

Can Maine become a global pioneer in renewable energy and infrastructure ? Can Maine become a global pioneer in renewable energy and infrastructure?

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Ron Lisnet: Hello and welcome to “The Maine Question” podcast from the University of Maine. I’m your host, Ron Lisnet, and this is episode two of our ninth season and our second go‑round in this new studio space we have. We’re particularly excited for this episode, which has been in the works for a long time now.

It’s almost too much to cram into one episode, but we’re going to give it a try. Think about some of the most intractable problems in our world today. How to produce clean energy, find affordable housing, make the manufacturing process more sustainable and green, build longer‑lasting roads and bridges, revive the forest products industry.

All of these issues are overwhelming and extremely challenging on their own. Now, imagine taking on these challenges simultaneously. That is the mission of the Advanced Structures & Composites Center at the University of Maine. It occupies an immense space on the east side of campus, and within those walls, state‑of‑the‑art work is happening in all those areas and much more.

As you walk through the space, there are projects, tests, and experiments happening in every corner. It’s almost too much to take in at once. The ASCC as it’s known, has too many achievements and milestones to list for you here. More than 200 patents, 15 spinoff companies, 500 partners around the globe.

Perhaps the biggest accomplishment is the 2,600 students who have worked at the ASCC. They’ve gone on to start their own companies, work in industry, and fill the vast need for engineers and other professions that Maine needs in order to grow the economy and prosper. With that, we welcome in our guest today.

Habib Dagher came to UMaine in 1986 and became the founding director of the ASCC 10 years later. In the early days, much of the work combined composite materials with wood for smaller bridges and similar‑size projects. From that humble beginning, the center has grown and evolved to take on some of the biggest, most pressing issues of our day.

Well, welcome. We appreciate you taking the time to talk to us. I know you’re awfully busy and we’re really excited to talk to you. I mean, there’s so many directions we could go, but maybe just tell us the evolution of all this.

When I first got to the university, this was fall 1993, I was told I’m going to go shoot a project in North Byron, Maine with somebody named Habib Dagher. You look the same as you did back then by the way, which is…

Habib Dagher: You’re very kind. [laughs] You haven’t changed either.

Ron: Thank you very much. Just talk about fall 1993, we were doing composite bridges. What was your vision at the time? How does it compare to what’s going on now with the ASCC?

Habib: Thank you. Our goal has been all along is to add value to our largest natural resources in Maine. As you know, Maine is the most heavily forested state in the US, and adding value to the resource is why we protect it, and developing the leaders that will actually develop these technologies has been the mission from the beginning.

When we started working on composite wood bridges, glulam bridges, was for the same reason. That idea grew to how do we look at more applications than just bridges.

Ron: You grew up in Lebanon, a long way away from a heavily forested area, certainly. Just talk about where you came from, how did you get interested in these topics? Why this direction, as opposed to building a building or some other type of engineering?

Habib: Sure. I came to the University of Maine as a faculty member 37 years ago. That was a long time. I’m hoping for 37 more. This is a wonderful institution. My goal was to come into the structural engineering program and add value to the program and grow it.

Living in Maine, you recognize right away that we are heavily forested, this is our biggest natural resource. At the time, we were not really using it effectively. We had a lot of products, but we’re also shipping logs. That we’re shipping hemlock logs from Portland seaports, completely raw logs.

Once I asked somebody near the Portland seaport, “What are these logs here, as high as you could see, and as long as you can see.” The person says, “I don’t know. We’re just shipping the logs to overseas for somebody to do something with them, make something with them, and sell it back to us.”

That’s not what we need to do to protect our natural resources and add value to them. That was the impetus to do something different and figure out how to add value to these resources, protect them at the same time, and educate the leaders.

We put a proposal into the National Science Foundation, there was four of us at the time to create the center to add value to this resource. Fast‑forward to today, we’ve grown from the 4 people, now 411 people work in the center.

We’re today the largest university‑based research center in Maine. We’re still adding value to our natural resources. We’re looking at wood and wood‑based materials, but also the ocean. The ocean is the biggest other natural resource in Maine.

How do we add value to the wood and to the ocean is what the center is looking to do. We’ve put together a strategic plan in 2020. We call it GEM. That stands for green energy and material. Our goal is to bring green energy and materials to society and to educate the leaders who will take these technologies and implement them in society.

Ron: You’re exploring such a wide range of topics, everything from your outer space to nanocellulose, to the smallest particle that you could possibly imagine. The common theme, like you said, forestry and ocean, I mean, that no matter what project you’re in, that’s the basis.

Habib: That’s correct. It’s how do we add value to these resources, protect them, and educate the leaders that will develop these technologies. We also have two very important values, in addition to our GEM, if you wish, vision.

The value is our students first. Our goal is to take students out of the classroom and put them in an environment where they can work together in teams and, we’ve had students from over 35 academic departments on campus, come and work in the laboratory. Over 2,700 interns, they get paid to work.

The students can work up to 30 hours a week, during the academic year, and get paid to do that, and full time in the summer in the breaks. By the time an undergrad graduates from our lab, they’ve had over two years of full‑time experience. That is invaluable.

They learn how to work together in teams. They learn how to appreciate each other and their others disciplines understand them. That’s how we’re going to solve big problems, by working together across disciplines. That students first is one of our core, if you wish, values.

The other value is none of us is as smart as all of us. It’s how do we all work together to solve the big problems that society is facing? The big problems we’re trying to solve right now, specific projects are our energy system, how do we electrify our heating and transportation systems in the state of Maine?

The other big one is the housing crisis that we’re faced with right now using additive manufacturing. Those are two of the big projects, if you wish, that we work on.

Ron: I want to ask you about the students a little later in workforce development. We’ll get to that. There’s been so many milestones and breakthroughs. We talked about some of them in the intro, more than 200 patents, 15 spin‑off companies, partners around the globe about 500 or so.

What stands out to you about the accomplishments or milestones or anything that the ASCC has been able to do?

Habib: The most important piece is the 2,700 students that intern in our laboratory. Every one of those has had at least one job offer on the way out. It’s transforming their education, is what we’re about here at this University of Maine.

Of course, all the other things are exciting as well, particularly, we’ve just last summer, Governor Mills signed into law a bill to procure 3,000 megawatts of floating offshore wind technology. Had we not done the research for 15 years, that would not have happened.

That’s about a 8 to $10 billion construction project over 15 years in Maine that will transform the way we use energy in the state. Seeing that also happen, and having the students being involved, if you wish, in that journey, is very rewarding to all of us.

Ron: Let’s dig into some of the topic areas that we’ve been discussing. We might as well start with offshore wind. How do you describe to someone that knows nothing about this, though, or what it is or how it works or anything? What is the project? What is the potential? What is the opportunity?

Habib: Sure. As you know, in Maine, we spend more than five billion dollars per year, buying fossil fuels, heating oil, gasoline, and so forth, that leaves the state as a whole. When we burn that, of course, that doesn’t do any good for the environment.

We embarked on a mission to figure out other natural resources in Maine that we could use to heat our homes and drive our cars. What we found out 15 years ago that within 50 miles of the coast of Maine, there’s enough offshore wind capacity, that’s equivalent to 156 nuclear power plants, and just sitting out there.

That is the largest untapped natural resource that Maine has had. We’re very energy‑rich, we’re just not using that energy. We’ve embarked on a mission to do that. The big technical challenges, we have very deep waters.

Basically, you have to float the turbines in order to do that. We’ve been researching ways to float turbines that can be fabricated in a port and towed out beyond the horizon. That will bring energy back to the state of Maine.

Think about a fixed bottom wind turbine that you see on onshore, take that, and float it in the ocean 30 miles or 40 miles offshore. That’s what we are designing and building.

Ron: These are made from concrete at the base of these, right?

Habib: Yeah.

Ron: Me with my 11th grade physics knowledge, concrete doesn’t float?

Habib: Yeah.

Ron: You guys have figured out a way to make that happen. That’s the basis of what these turbines are sitting on?

Habib: Yes. The hulls are made with floating concrete systems. They float, the concrete floats because really, we’re using concrete cans. We call them flotation columns, essentially. Each hull has three concrete flotation columns.

It works like a catamaran, but we call it a trimaran. If you sail the catamaran, it has two hulls. The bigger the hull is, the more stable the cat is. The farther apart the hulls are, the more stable the catamaran is.

Ours is a trimaran and it has three hulls. Each one of them is a concrete can. If you make a wine barrel‑size concrete can, that will float too because it’s got air in it. What makes it float is the air and not concrete.

Ron: It’s all right. 3,000 megawatts, that’s what you talked about, is the next big goal. How much energy is that? How much does it take to power of the state of Maine, for example?

Habib: That’s very close to what it takes to power the state of Maine. We’re not going to use it for turning lights on at night. We want to use that to stop burning fossil fuels in our cars and stop using heating oil to heat our homes or natural gas.

Basically, we’re going to use that to electrify heating and transportation. To use heat pumps, driven by electricity, to heat our homes and many people know how heat pumps work. To run the heat pumps comes from offshore wind, it’s like offshore wind heating your home.

Then if electric cars, of course, are the future right now, and then if the offshore wind is filling up the car for us at night, then offshore wind is driving us up and down I‑95. That’s where we’re heading. We’re heading to using this 3,000 megawatts to heat our home and drive our car and reduce our reliance on fossil fuels.

Ron: The next big topic area, housing. About a year ago, you printed the first bio‑based 3D‑printed home. Take us through that, and where’s that headed?

Habib: Absolutely. We printed what we call BioHome3D. It’s a 600‑square‑foot one‑bedroom home that meets all the requirements of Maine state housing. The issue we’re facing in Maine and other parts of the country, is that we need a lot of homes, and it costs too much right now. There’s not too many people to build them.

In Maine, we don’t have the labor to build the homes. Anybody trying to go even renovate a house or renovate a bathroom, they know they can’t find people. Plus, the cost of materials have skyrocketed, plywood and OSB if you go by and buy them and two‑by‑fours, they’ve grown so much because of the pandemic and the supply chain.

Materials cost too much, we don’t have enough people to build the home. As a result of that, we had a crisis. Our idea was working with the Maine State Housing Authority is could we use wood waste, which we have lots of in Maine, to help print the home.

Now, wood waste basically is the waste from the sawmills. We call that wood residuals. When you saw a log, a lot of it doesn’t make the grade. That material used to be sent to the pulp and paper mills. We had five pulp and paper mills in Maine shut down in one year.

That material now has to find a place to go. It’s about a million tons of wood residuals in our sawmills in the region every year. That’s enough to produce 100,000 homes. We’re not going to, of course, use it all to print homes.

We’re taking this wood waste, which is a crisis we have. We’re taking the housing crisis, which is another crisis we have, putting the two together and creating an opportunity. That’s what the vision here is. By printing the home versus stick building the home, we deal with the labor crisis that we have.

If we can have machines and engineers producing the homes and that’s where BioHome3D was born is to do that. We’re partnered with the Maine State Housing right now and others in the States. Just in about 15 minutes, we’re going to have the housing committee from the legislature will be in our lab to look at BioHome3Ds ready for the first time.

Ron: It’s a win‑win‑win.

Habib: It is. What we’re trying to do is also developing environmentally sustainable construction methods. We’re printing with wood versus printing with concrete. Others are trying to print with concrete. The difference in our technology is that we’re printing the whole house, the roof, the floor, the walls, whereas the concrete folks are only printing the walls, and they still stick build everything else.

In our technology, we’re printing everything. We’re prefabricating the home in a factory. That’s what the plan is, and take it in modules, and then put it back together on site.

Ron: Almost everything in our society is built on petroleum products and plastics. It’s in everything, as we know. How do you make that shift when it’s baked into our way of life and jobs and everything out there? I mean, that’s a challenge, I would imagine?

Habib: It is. It’s a challenge. That’s the challenge that our GEM strategic plan wants us to solve. That’s where we want to go. In the housing components, I give you an example, this BioHome3D that we printed, has 30 percent less carbon footprint than a typical home when you build it during the construction process. It’s 100 percent recyclable.

Our children and grandchildren 200 years from now can take the house, grind it up, and put it back to the printer. We have master’s degree students right now, doing that five times. They’re recycling the house five times to figure out how the material properties change.

Think about, if each time it is 200 years of use, that’s 1,000 years of reuse that we’re looking at for these materials systems. We’re thinking that way with developing technologies that allow us to do that. Everything it took to build this house was a naturally grown material.

As we grow more trees and sustainably and the plan is and develop bio resins that we’re using, then everything we have is grown in a plant, on a tree, or some form of plant or tree. It’s sustainable.

Ron: Problems go away like PFAS and other harmful chemicals and substances?

Habib: Certainly, there’s no PFAS in this technology. The other also that’s a piece that’s very important is reducing the waste. If you look at a stick‑built home, right now, there’s a lot of truckloads that go to the dump just because you’re cutting out the windows and the doors.

In our case, you don’t have to cut them out. We print the openings for the windows and the doors, exactly what we need. We don’t have to take and waste those materials. Our goal is to get to near zero waste during the fabrication and construction of the house.

Ron: Talk to us about that. You mentioned the GEM concept. I know there’s a building in the works. What will be in that building? What’s going to go on in there? Where is that project right now?

Habib: GEM was another one of our moonshots initiatives. This facility is called a research factory of the future. It is to figure out how to scale up these manufacturing technologies for BioHome3D and also for boat building that we’ve printed a boat three years ago.

How do we take these technologies and scale up the production processes? That’s a lot of science and engineering that goes back through that.

The goal of this facility is figure out how to scale up the production of BioHome3D and the production of housing, so it’s got two bays. One’s a housing bay, one is a boat building bay, and the research base. Students and faculty and staff are going to be able to work together to scale up those technologies.

We break ground next the summer with this. It’s also, we’ve formed a relationship with the new college, Maine College of Engineering and Computing, MCEC. We’re bringing engineering and computing together because this would be a smart factory using digital manufacturing as we’re printing a home, for example, or fabricating a home or a boat, we’re scanning that as we go along the way.

If everything is about to go wrong, something’s going to go wrong, going to go off dimensions, is going to…then we will know right away using the sensors and using AI, we’ll be able to go back and fix it before the problem happens. That’s where we’re heading with the technology like this.

We call the closed‑loop manufacturing process. Think about the students and the staff and the faculty in engineering and computing, working together to try to solve some of these stuff problems.

Ron: That gets to something that I’ve often thought about that Maine traditionally is always at the tail end of the pipeline. We have to import all the oil and gas we have, no way to generate our own energy, but this is a project.

The offshore wind also, and manufacturing homes that relies on local resources that turns that 180 degrees around. Maine is now a generator in outputting and getting the economic benefit from all these ideas.

Habib: Absolutely. We talk about offshore wind. We spend five‑plus billion dollars per year. That’s more than a state annual budget in buying gasoline and fossil fuels in the state of Maine. If we can keep most of that here in Maine, and build this infrastructure and maintain it, the fuel’s free.

You’re right. This is a direction we’re heading. Plus, the impact on the environments are enormous in terms of benefits from not putting CO2 in the air, and the housing piece as well. Now, if we can grow everything we build our homes with and recycle it here in Maine, we have natural resources to do that.

That gets back to the GEM, which is green energy and materials. These are the materials for the home are green, the energy is green, and that’s really where we’re heading.

Ron: What’s the timeline? When will this factory of the future be up and running, you hope?

Habib: We’ve hope to break ground this August with the facility and to have it up and running two years later. It takes about two years to get it up and running. In 2026, we should have it up and running.

We also partnered already with, for example, Penquis, which is a nonprofit organization that focuses on housing in our area. The first thing we’ll do as GEM is print nine homes for the homeless, and prove that you can do that just to help scale up the technology.

Ron: One thing I’ve always been curious about, you’re an engineer. If I need to answer a calculus question or anything like that, I come to you, but so many of the projects and so many of the initiatives you’re talking about involve politics, economics, sociology, psychology.

How do you navigate through some of that? Did you ever think you were going to have to exercise that part of your brain as much as you’ve had to, to wade through some of the things to get where you want to go?

Habib: The key here is bringing people together. The center, I tell everybody’s nondenominational. In other words, anybody can come and work from across campus. We’ve had over 35 different disciplines like you said, economics, policy, business, engineering, communications.

We have people that have expertise in all the areas, the students and their staff, and the faculty come together to help solve these problems. That’s why working together is so important. I learn every day. I learn from everyone that we work with, and we’ve learned how to work together.

It took 27 years since the center has started. We’ve learned how to do that. We’ve learned how to work together across disciplines. We keep learning every day.

Ron: One other sort of idea that, I have so many here to get to, but roads, bridges, that’s another area you’re working on. I know there’s the bridge and backpack, a huge part of an economy and a state going, right?

Habib: Yeah. Absolutely. Our roads and bridges are falling apart across the country and in Maine as well because of the corrosion of the steel that we have and on the road. We have an initiative to have more durable bridges.

One of our next big projects is happening as we speak. It’s the bridge coming into Orono if you take I‑95 over the Stillwater River, and next is going to be close to a 500‑foot‑long bridge designed using technology developed in our center. It’s going to be kind of a, “Welcome to Orono. Welcome to University of Maine Bridge,” that is designed to be corrosion‑free.

Instead of having to rebuild these bridges every 40 or 50 years, our goal is to see can we double and triple that. When you think about the Romans have aqueducts that they built 2,000 years ago that we’re still using. You think we should be able to do a bit more better than replacing our bridges every generation.

The Maine DOT and other DOTs across the countries are on the same page. We’ve been working very closely with them. They are great partners, they understand that. What is very interesting is that the older engineers who are leaving right now the DOTs saying, “Wait a minute, I’m replacing the bridge I designed 40 years ago.” That’s not right.

They’re coming to us. Actually, the chief engineer for the main DOT joined a spin‑off company that we have from the university, specifically, so he can develop the next generation of materials that will last longer. It’s good to see that people are coming together to help solve some of these tough problems.

Ron: Let’s get back just real briefly to these, the students that you’re putting out, workforce, filling labor needs. Maine is in desperate need, like a lot of places for the next generation to come along. In some ways, that’s maybe your greatest output or greatest product, right?

Habib: Absolutely. As I’ve said, what I’m most proud of is we’ve had over 2,700 interns that have worked in this lab from 35 different academic departments. That’s an army of people who are going out to the workforce, and taking these ideas and what they’ve learned in this lab and applying them in society.

That’s the best output that we have. The fact of the future, the GEM fact of the future research factory, is going to bring more of those students together, from engineering, from computing together to come and solve problems together.

That’s the best thing we can give the students not only what they learn in the books, but what they learn by working together, what they learn by appreciating each other, by appreciating other people’s disciplines and understanding, “Wow. I need an electrical engineer. I need a business student. I need a communication student,” because that’s the only way it’s going to work.

They learn that at the University for four years, and that’s the best ticket that we give them going into the workforce.

Ron: Final question. We always like to ask this, some version of this. Take us out 5, 10 years, or whatever time horizon you’d like. What are we going to see? What are we going to be amazed and surprised about out there, whether that’s in water on land?

Habib: Certainly being able to have floating turbines at the end of the decade in the Gulf of Maine, producing electricity that could be used to heat our homes and drive our cars, is one of the biggest goals that we have going forward. We’re working very diligently to make that happen.

I would say floating turbines that we can go visit one day with a vessel and say, “Look what we’ve done. We’re using our own energy, clean environment all fabricated in Maine,” is really what we’d like to be able to see.

On the housing side, we’d like to be able to see more homes being produced here to help serve our society. There was a report last week that came out that the state of Maine needs nearly 80,000 housing units by 2030, 80,000. There’s not enough people to build them all.

Hopefully, before the end of the decade, we’d have a factory here in Maine, producing some of these home using 3D‑printed bio‑based materials. I’d like to see that happen.

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Ron: Great. We could do an episode on all of these topics. Maybe we will down the road here as these things develop. I want to thank you so much for taking the time.

Habib: Thank you.

Ron: Been wanting to talk to you a long time, and it’s finally happened, so I’m excited.

Habib: Thank you. It’s a great pleasure to be with you. Thank you for all the work you do. Thanks.

Ron: That’s it for this episode. You can find the audio version of all of our podcasts on Apple and Google, Spotify and SoundCloud, and the University of Maine website. If you have any questions or comments, please send them to mainequestion@maine.edu We’ll catch you next time on The Maine Question.

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