American Floating Offshore Wind Technical Summit — Sept. 25, 2024

President Joan Ferrini-Mundy delivered a keynote address at the 2024 American Floating Offshore Wind Technical Summit (AFloat) on Sept. 25 in Portland, Maine. The talk focused on the importance and role of public education research in advancing industries like floating offshore wind. UMaine has been a global leader in this space for more than 15 years in both education and research and development. AFloat is the longest running conference dedicated to Floating Offshore Wind in the country and brings global leaders to the heart of the conversation.

The presentation slides are available here.

TRANSCRIPT

Moderator:

We’re going to go ahead and move to President Ferrini‑Mundy’s talk, and then we’ll take a break.

Joan Ferrini‑Mundy became president of the University of Maine and its regional campus, the University of Maine at Machias, in July 2018. In 2021, she was also appointed as vice chancellor for research and innovation for the entire University of Maine system, which includes seven campuses across the state of Maine.

In this role, she leads a formalized effort to make UMaine’s research infrastructure accessible to and supportive of all universities and faculty in the entire system.

Prior to joining the University of Maine and the University of Maine at Machias communities on July 2018, she was also chief operating officer of the National Science Foundation, leading essentially research and development for the United States at the level that she’s bringing here to the state of Maine.

Her distinguished career spans the fields of mathematics education, STEM education and policy, teacher education, and research administration. She has more than 100 publications and has mentored 10 doctoral students.

She’s very passionate about bringing research and education together and very passionate about building new industries based on renewable energy. You’ll hear what she’s trying to do here at the University of Maine.

Her numerous awards and recognitions include the US Senior Executive Service Presidential Rank Award of Distinguished Executive, MSU’s University Distinguished Professorship, election as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Mathematical Society, and the Seaman Knapp Award in recognition of her leadership and contributions to food and agricultural sciences.

She also this last year was selected as the Business Leader of the Year for the state of Maine. Please help me welcome President Joan Ferrini‑Mundy.

President Joan Ferrini‑Mundy:

Morning everybody. You can be more enthusiastic. Still early in the day. How are you enjoying Maine and Portland? Great place for a conference. I’m hoping you’re getting to see the city and the state a little bit while you’re here, for those who are not from Maine.

I’m delighted to be able to speak with you for a few minutes this morning.

Talk isn’t queued up.

I need to ask for some help, probably. While we’re doing that, I’m going to tell you what I’d like to talk when we get slides. I can talk about it even if the slides don’t come up, which is this.

We have this remarkable entity within the University of Maine, the Advanced Structures and Composites Center, which is home to the offshore floating wind program that you’re talking about offshore wind, and a variety of other related topics, as you’ll hear today.

There we go. Thank you.

All of that sits within a land, sea, and space grant university. I’m curious. How many of you are based in universities and higher education?

It’s a portion this audience, but certainly not the majority. I hope that, for those of you who are not, this will help broaden your understanding of what a land, sea, and space grant university is, and why an entity like the Advanced Structures and Composites Center, and specifically, the work in floating offshore wind, has been kind of a microcosm.

The University of Maine, by now you may know, we’re located north of here. We were founded in 1865, so coming up on our 160th anniversary. For a university that is this old, there’s a constant challenge in staying modern, staying relevant, staying in a way that can be focused on the future.

I want to talk today a little bit about how having an example like the offshore wind work that goes on at the University of Maine is actually propelling this university forward.

How it is, in some ways, a case study for both how an entity like ASCC can grow and become more diverse, and how a university can grow and take on more of what’s required in a land‑grant mission.

We have many facilities across the state. Here you get a look.

We have a coastal facility. We have the Wind/Wave research lab in ASCC on the campus. We have Witter Farm where we have our agriculture mission that extends and continues for the university. We have site here in Portland that we share across the University of Maine system.

We have forests and farms across the state. We study fisheries. We have a lot of the traditional heritage industry focus. Within that, of course, we have ASCC.

We are a land grant. Told you that remains only our one university, which for those outside of academia, that’s a wonderful rating for us in the Carnegie Classification of universities that signals our intensity and success in research.

We are the state’s only DI athletics program. If you’re hockey fans, keep watching this season. We’re very, very hopeful. We have about 11,000 students, both undergraduates and graduates. We span 81 countries.

Our research expenditures continue to increase and so our herd rankings keep decreasing, which is good. You want to be a lower herd number. That gives you a sense of our diversity.

A very interesting phenomenon, of course, is when you have an entity as big and growing as quickly as ASCC within a university, that requires that we pay a lot of attention to how our land grant mission continues to evolve and how an entity like the ASCC and the Offshore Wind Program can grow it.

We are a land grant, meaning that we are part of the Morrill Act consequences from 1862. This focus on the benefit of agriculture and the mechanic arts does continue in the modern versions of those domains here at the University of Maine.

In particular, land grants were formed for the democratization of education to enable a wider range of people, particularly the people within a given state who are working to continue to advance the economic growth of that state, even back in 1865, so that they would have a chance to be educated in areas that were important to the university and to the state.

Now we jump to 1996 with the founding with four people of the Advanced Structures and Composites Center to a few facts from today. You’ve probably heard some about this. Again, I’m using this ASCC and the Offshore Wind Work as an example of exemplary growth and modeling within a research university that is a land grant.

You see here some basic facts. This is a big operation, much bigger than anything else within the university. It exceeds the size of some of our academic units in terms of numbers of employees and numbers of students that are engaged. This is a big piece of our university.

You can look to the history of ASCC, which I’m not going to take up in detail. People in the room know that far better than I do. Habib Dagher, Jeff Thaler, Jake Ward are here. They can tell you more.

The focus on offshore wind, to me, is a perfect example of doing what land grants are supposed to do, which is to say, “What are some problems that this state has? How can this university, which has the mission of serving the state, how can this university try to make a difference?”

You see data. Thank you to Habib and team for these slides, but a notion that even in 2006, there was a vision about how important it would be to work on reducing the energy expenses within the state.

A solution emerged through the work of people in ASCC and elsewhere that was going to tap Maine’s offshore wind, the largest untapped energy resource available, and on an alternative route to imported fuels to focus on local production of energy, to create local economic growth, and then to help with all kinds of environmental causes.

The choice of the problem…I come from mathematics, and every now and then…anybody in math person in here? You all have some math. I know that. I can remember colleagues when I was at Michigan State University, we’d be reviewing promotion and tenure cases, and someone would say, “He has good taste in problems.”

That’s actually a thing. That actually matters for academics, particularly in a land grant. The problems that get chosen that can be well supported by the university and by the resources that surround it matter. For a land grant choosing to work on finding solutions to energy crises was a great, great choice.

For those of you affiliated with universities, talking with your administrators, it’s always important to argue that the problem you’re picking fits within the context in which you sit. Oops, didn’t mean to do that.

The history is long. This is detailed, and we can make these slides available if you’d like to see them. The history is important because it shows how a unit within a university can span all of the dimensions that a land grant university needs to span.

A couple of points that I would make here, this development, the Odyssey four offshore wind work at UMaine spans, I believe, three different governors, many presidents at the university, a variety of faculty, staff, and students because we’re dynamic and people come in and move through, and yet there was a focus and a plan, or at least a plan evolved over time as the context called for it.

That’s important too. I take a lot of lessons from that as a university president for how we make progress in introducing new areas of work within the university. The timeline continues, again, if you care to see more detail. You see alongside on the right, a lot of legislative activity within the state that mattered for this project to work.

Which brings me to the main point of my remarks, which is this, we have UMaine floating offshore wind activity. In the clouds around the edges here, you see all of the dimensions that that work brings for our university. I can’t tell you how much the university learns from having this entity as a central part of what we do.

In the clouds, you see major commitments that any research university has to have and a few others that we are trying to make distinctive for the University of Maine. Certainly, on the left, research and experimental development that’s what universities are supposed to do, particularly land grants.

When you’re a land grant, if you can be doing that around a topic that’s vitally important for the state, that’s especially important. Interdisciplinarity becomes the coin of the realm today. The very best thinking and ideas we are finding come when we cut across disciplines, cut across areas, and there’s so much of that that happens here in this program.

Statewide outreach is a part of what the university needs to do. Informing policymakers is a major part of what all universities try to do, but R1s and public universities have a big role in that, both at the state and federal level.

Creating corporate partnerships is also who we are as a land grant, devising professional education opportunities for our state so that the economic development of our state can grow.

Then, research‑based learning, which I’ll say more about in the context of offshore floating wind, but more specifically for the university or more generally for the university, this is an area we are working to grow where we can distinguish ourselves by saying all students beginning the day they walk into the university, can participate in some an authentic research‑based learning experience.

By this, we don’t mean that they’re cleaning test tubes. By this, we mean that they are in the field or in a lab or working on designing a new idea and creating a patent as happens in our offshore wind work or engaging in a creative experience in the arts or the humanities, a wide range of opportunities.

I hope you’ll start to hear more about UMaine being a leader in this. Again, much to learn from what goes on in the offshore wind history here. All of these parts of a university come together as I began to think about this, Habib, around the work of this particular lab.

They come together in other labs and entities at our university too, but this provides quite an extraordinary example. I’m not going to go into a lot of detail here because the technical experts in the room will be dismayed at how little technical knowledge I have on this.

Suffice it to say that it’s really important that we have both rather basic work going on as well as experimental development, and that there’s a feedback loop there. On the basic side, we continue, I’m told, in ASCC to work on the use and development of greener concretes.

We’re studying the use of nanocellulose to improve concrete properties. That’s rather basic work, and that has to go on very close to the experimental development that you are hearing more about probably at this meeting where we are testing products and deploying models and scale models and revising as we go.

That cycle is vital in a research university, and UMaine has that modeled very, very well in this area. The research‑based learning that I mentioned, here is a little bit of a picture of the future for this. The green energy and materials factory of the future initiated through the ASCC will be a research facility that’s focused on revolutionizing manufacturing.

As important as that is, as incredibly useful as that is going to be to the nation and to the state, equally important to me is that it’s being designed as a research learning site where students will come in the door and be able to be a part of the design of the products and materials and new inventions that are coming and try their own smaller experiments.

This is a very interesting experiment where we’re looking at how to design a building that will accommodate the concept of student research from the beginning. This group does much more. They do a K12 windstorm challenge to build a pipeline to engage students early on.

Students have been engaged, particularly PhD students, in the floating call development technology all along the way, and more than 70 of the patents involve student inventors. We are, again, looking closely at ASCC as a microcosm for what this entire university is striving to do and to be a professional education.

Again, people who are in these fields and who are looking for continued growth and development as the fields shift are able to take part in concentrations that we offer at the university and offshore wind and micro‑credentials and the like.

Again, it gives us a way to model how other parts of this university can do this same important work. Corporate partnerships, obviously, a part of what a land grant university needs to do and foster.

We need to be serving the state, and therefore, partnering with entities within the state and beyond that can help to solve the kinds of problems that we’re working on.

It’s not only ASCC working in offshore wind, but other partnerships throughout the university that will support and advance a variety of fields that are central to particularly the offshore wind, but others as well, ranging from supply chain work to building and deployment of facilities and so on.

These partnerships are critical to us, and we learn so much about what’s needed. Again, a way that a land grant university is supposed to be working. We are always in the business, not only around offshore wind but across the entire university and all the fields that we span in the business of informing policymakers with our work.

Many, many examples that we could go into in great detail. You are hearing about some of this. I’d like to pull out and cite, in particular, the main offshore wind research consortium that Governor Mills initiated in 2021, a bipartisan group that is looking to understand local and regional impacts of floating offshore wind in the Gulf of Maine.

There are representatives from the university and the science and engineering communities, as well as the commercial and recreational fisheries, Maine wildlife habitat experts, and many, many other organizations across the state of Maine where the work that’s done not just in the ASCC areas, but in related areas across UMaine and beyond are a part of this.

Again, we’re able to point to this and as we help others try to come along and build their own labs, their own areas of expertise, this becomes a way to see a path for how the University of Maine can establish this contribution in a variety of areas.

We are very involved, as I’ve already, I think, made the point, in state‑wide outreach solving Maine’s problems, part of the governor’s Maine Won’t Wait climate action plan work, this work bears upon that.

It’s a way to help our newer faculty as well as our students to see that you can make a difference with a research career in a variety of places within policy, within education, within R&D, within the corporate sector, and well beyond. That’s important for a research land grant university.

The work is interdisciplinary. That’s another whole talk on its own that I could do, which I won’t do.

Simply to say that these are a couple of recent grants that show us the nature of the work and also the domains of expertise that are involved because it’s really great for a university when you’ve got an anchor activity that then ties you to other fields and allows for advancement in those other fields in conjunction with it.

There would be others that we could name, many, many other university partners, national labs, other kinds of organizations that are broadening the environmental and interdisciplinary perspectives on this commercial perspectives and therefore give us better solutions. Part of what I’m trying to say here is this, all of these areas, to me, are ideal.

I could have made that slide without knowing anything about ASCC, but I made it after I knew a lot about ASCC because this is a university that I think is striving to continue to be the model of a modern land grant university, a modern land, sea, and space grant university.

We are then drawing on and partnering with the great work of many entities across the university, but particularly, for today, the offshore floating wind work that we have learned about in ASCC to push the rest of the university really to say, what are you all doing about research‑based learning? Here’s a way to do it.

What are you doing about creating means of informing policy? Here are some pathways for doing that. I’m very excited about your conference and the fact that we have this kind of national and international opportunities to collaborate with colleagues.

As I watch the titles of the talks and learn more about what you’re doing here today, I just will share that as a university president. The eye that I have on this is the difference that this kind of work can make for the effectiveness of higher education, particularly public higher education, and wanted to be able to share that angle with you.

I’m very appreciative of your time, and happy to take a couple of questions, if you’d like. Otherwise, to thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today.

Moderator:

How many of you think you need people to do this work?

President Ferrini‑Mundy:

They’re afraid to raise their hand because they think they might have to get a microphone to ask a question, so this is question free. I am interested in this. For how many of you is the development of the workforce a primary concern?

Right. We’re a place that is figuring out how to do that and wants to continue to figure out how to that even better in partnership. Yes, you have a question?

Audience Member:

Thank you for your presentation. One of the concerns I heard of universities taking on the development of floating offshore wind, was being able to partner effectively with a broad range of industry necessary to bring it.

I know that, years ago when the award was first won by [indecipherable] , there was a concern about getting together with a company that could actually build a foundation, and then, those who could do the permitting, all of the things required to pull off a scale demonstration like this.

I’m wondering if you have a perspective on the challenges that that faced? Where it worked and where it didn’t, where you could do better. Is this an example for other universities to follow?

President Ferrini‑Mundy:

Thank you for the question. There will be others in the room who may wish to comment too. What I would say is, I arrived about six years ago, and so, it was well along its way at that time.

I think, for universities to recognize that this is going to take them into territory that isn’t necessarily their mainstream work, we actually have a vice president for strategic partnerships innovation, resources, and the economy. Is that right? No. [laughs] Close enough. Jake Ward.

We’ve grown that unit to be able to provide the support for all of the things you mentioned, the contracting that’s needed, the permitting, all of the legal dimensions that are a part of this.

That’s been a bit new for this university to have that extensive engagement in those domains, but it is the way of the future, at least for our university, not only in this area but beyond. There are lots of lessons to be learned that I’m sure Habib and others could share with you.

We try some things that don’t quite work, and then we have to regroup and learn more, and try another way. Being ready for the challenges of this cross‑sector work is important and needs the support of the university administration. Habib, I don’t know if you wish to add.

Habib Dagher:

Yes, that’s exactly right. We’ve learned a lot over the years. What we learned is we have to bring together a lot of people. We put consortia together that include industry, that includes developers, that includes fabricators, that includes and so on and so forth.

Some of these consortia that called the DeepCwind Consortium that we did 12 years ago, erected the first floater off the US coast at that time. It did work. We learned a lot along the ways. As we speak today, we are building another floater.

That would be, for many years, probably the only floater off the US coast. It’s being fabricated, as I said yesterday. As we speak, they’re pouring concrete today as part of this unit. That will be deployed fairly shortly, we hope before the end of this year, off the coast of Maine.

We’ve learned a lot, but what we learned is how to train the next generation. That’s the beauty of the university doing this work is we have the opportunity to have hands‑on training for the students in all these different areas.

We have a workforce in the future that can do this. When you hire students from here, they’ve done this. How many people can say they’ve done this here in the US, and they’ve built things and put them in the water, and so on and so forth?

That’s the beauty of having these demonstration projects being done at the universities. We’re not only developing a technology but also we’re developing the people that are needed to build this industry.

Moderator:

There’s a few other hands that were up.

President Ferrini‑Mundy:

It would be good if I could know who’s asking the question. If you wouldn’t mind introducing yourself, please.

Darren McQuillan:

Can everybody hear me because it wasn’t working yesterday? My name’s Darren McQuillan. I work with Bardex. We were the ones in the event last night. I get told to use it properly. I can’t use it properly. There we go.

Darren McQuillan, Bardex. I’ve got a question. It’s great with the technology and where we’re going and everything else with offshore wind. It’s awesome. What the university is doing is tremendous.

With regards to suggestions for maybe some classroom tuition and things like that is to take it a little bit beyond that. We need to get into like think gig skill beyond pilot, beyond demonstrators, and everything needs to be focused on gig‑scale execution. What does that mean? The devil’s in the details on the EPCI. That’s where it all happens.

Any change or fundamental issue that changes in that can cost the developer billions or save the developer billions.

Again, having more people who were taught at college or at school, or at the university by some of the EPCI companies of the world, just to educate them on lean manufacturing. What does that look like? What systems are out there that we can use that can eliminate CO2 footprints and things like that? How can we better support the execution of the concrete floating solution?

At the end of the day, it’s climate change. We need to come together as Habib said. Again, that’s fundamentally missing from some studies. Everything just assumes it happens when you move to an EPCI company.

A lot of these companies are pulling in people from your university and then teaching them how to do it, so getting that as included as part of a course would be fundamental to supporting the university with a big focus on operational safety pleas.

The last thing we want to do, there’s too many touch points on this execution, and nobody will remember the money. They’ll just remember the people that got hurt. Operational safety should be included in all of that. It wasn’t really a question. It was just a suggestion. It’s a pleasure to be here.

President Ferrini‑Mundy:

It’s actually a great suggestion. I imagine our group has some thinking going on and some work in that area. What strikes me is that what you’re describing could also be a way to distinguish and use the great resources that we have in this lab as a part of students’ education and to focus on the interdisciplinary part.

I would imagine students in business, students in law, students in a variety of engineering fields, as well as students in the social sciences who are looking for employment that might involve understanding how people engage together in making decisions and getting work done…

All of those fields would be germane in terms of the preparation of students at that level, at that operationalization and implementation big‑scale level. I hope that that’s something that we’re thinking about, but also could imagine programs for doing that. Yes, sir.

Chris Mitchell:

Hi. I’m Chris Mitchell. I’m with WSB, a large engineering firm, WSP, right here in Portland. Just to put the workforce needs in context, as a company, we’ve hired over 10,000 people this year. In Maine, we’ve hired 30 people in the Portland office, where there’s a huge need for development of the workforce and for making them work‑ready. Thank you for what you’re doing.

President Ferrini‑Mundy:

We really appreciate that.

We can applaud that. That’s right.

Of course, we’re very grateful for the corporate partners as well as advisors that we have. One extension of this notion of research‑based learning, research learning experience…Habib talks about it as real hands‑on work. Students know how to do the kinds of things that are needed.

One expansion of that can be more development of intentional partnerships with particular companies, so that we have a real way of learning exactly what the needs are and what the future needs look like. Then we can customize programs to serve those, what the needs of the current workforce may be for upskilling, and how we can be a partner there.

That’s a bit of a new frontier for us. We have examples of that, but I would like to see us expand in that way too. Yes.

Grant Provost:

Hi. I’m Grant Provost. I’m the Business Agent for Iron Workers Local 7 in the state of Maine, also the Vice President of the AFL‑CIO. A lot of these skills that we need coming up are things that we already do. We have some of the best training for workforce. We can scale up like no other.

I’m just wondering how the university plans on pairing with registered apprenticeship programs and the building trades in general. We’d like to participate in this. We can get you to the finish line with the workforce.

President Ferrini‑Mundy:

Great to know. We have space to grow there, in how to make those partnerships. I’d like to talk further with you and your colleagues about what that looks like. I will say that we have excellent partnerships with the Maine community college system and their technical preparation programs.

We’re looking for ways to expand opportunities for students who begin in those programs and might like to go to the workforce for a while and then come in and complete a degree in engineering at the bachelor’s level. We’ve got the beginnings of those pathways, but very, very open to further discussion about how we can support the great work that you and your colleagues do.

Jason Shedlock:

Thanks for that answer. My name is Jason Shedlock. I’m the President of the Maine State Building and Construction Trades Council, work with Grant and 19 other trade unions. When we talk about the community college system, there’s an obvious role for a lot of folks.

I took a note on something that you said. You’re spot on, on a number of things. One was that it isn’t your mainstream work, with some of these things. It’s ours. The registered apprenticeship program in labor unions across the country is the second largest training program in the country, second to the US military.

When these large projects, whether they start small and get large, as it comes to a demonstration project, a research array that we have agreement on that will be high‑road labor, construction work…If you’re pouring concrete today, it’s not an engineer that’s pouring a concrete. That’s a laborer and an iron worker.

Oftentimes, we think about things being built and some of the upskilling or whatever. These are folks that will pour concrete on your hole today and finish the job and then go build your local hospital too.

There are certain nuances in skills, but at the end of the day, this is workforce in Maine that has built Maine for years bringing in registered apprenticeship in construction, which is the largest registered apprenticeship industry in the state of Maine. I would just encourage folks, certainly at the University of Maine as well as you that are doing projects in your own jurisdictions…

I would assume that you’re working with the building trades because we’ve built these around the country and the large projects fall under project labor agreements, which we heard about yesterday. Happy to chat offline. Grant is here, as well as the President of the Iron Workers. Thanks for your participation.

President Ferrini‑Mundy:

Thank you for that. I’d need more information from inside the university about what we’re already doing, but I’d be very open to a small meeting where we might really sit down together and talk about what some possibilities could look like. If your folks, if you are willing to help me organize that, we’d work together. Let’s follow up.

Adrian Granda:

My name’s Adrian Granda. I’m from the Port of Long Beach. I’m really grateful for the conversation that just happened because that was going to be the second part of my two‑part question.

The Port of Long Beach is the second largest containerized port in the country. We do eight million TEUs every single year. We’re focused on decarbonization. We have a 400‑acre proposed plan for staging and integration at our port. We’re very invested in seeing the West Coast and California convert and create this green grid.

In addition to the collaboration with organized labor, I was also interested in how you engage at the younger level. We hear a lot about community benefits industrialization. How do you educate the public, young people in particular? We’re thinking everything from K to 12. How does that bleed into the university programs?

President Ferrini‑Mundy:

I did very briefly mention the Windstorm Challenge, which is a large competition sponsored here at UMaine by the Advanced Structures & Composites Center, which essentially requires students, under certain constraints, to build their own model floating wind turbine.

Then those get tested on the campus. There are scholarships and prizes. It’s an amazing event with like a thousand students or something. That’s one model.

Another model could be to, again, thinking in an interdisciplinary way, make sure that our university, with its education of teachers, is actually helping teachers to understand the way in which other aspects of the university are paving the way for the future workforce and make that a part of the education of teachers.

Habib, we haven’t talked about this, but what if we had a credential for K‑12 teachers that would engage them in a deeper understanding?

The understanding of the public is also something that we find ourselves very much engaged in. I don’t know how intentionally we do that necessarily, but we always, of course, have a public‑facing side to this work. Again, an area that I think, with more intentionality, it fits within the role of the public land‑grant, and so we can consider that.

I don’t know if Dean Guidoboni is here. In any case, the dean of the Maine College of Engineering and Computing, Giovanna Guidoboni, has taken an enormous interest in K‑12 engagement. We just recently were able to host a national robotics competition at the university that she brought to us, VEX Robotics.

We have all these opportunities and occasions to work with K12. I think there might be ways to make it even more impactful. Great, great suggestion.

Moderator:

Take one last question here?

President Ferrini‑Mundy:

Yeah.

Sandy Butterfield:

Sandy Butterfield. I’m sorry I didn’t introduce myself the first time around.

President Ferrini‑Mundy:

That’s OK.

Sandy Butterfield:

I wanted to piggyback a little bit on the whole concept of teaching students to do things. I came from the University of Massachusetts. In 1975, we started a program…We didn’t but Bill Hieronymus started a program that was designed to build a 25 kilowatt turbine. It was tiny by today’s standards, but huge by those standards. We didn’t know that we could do it.

As students, we took the lead of Bill Hieronymus, who said, “Yes, you can.” We went ahead and did it. That program has graduated hundreds of students that are still in the wind industry today. Walt Musial came out of that program, Brian McNiff, and many others that you all know.

I think it’s huge for universities to get involved with things that are actually building stuff. The learning curve for when you’re building something is tremendously different than learning it through books. Nothing to take away from that, but when you’re doing it, you’re learning very fast because you’re making mistakes in a constructive way, which I think is tremendously important.

I also wanted to piggyback on the trades. I think that your comment about partnering with the trades is huge. I was fortunate enough to help get the IEC Renewable Energy certification program going. It’s a certification program at the international level.

We felt like it was very important to train laborers or mechanics, maintenance workers, on how to work with wind turbines. That’s a unique skill and it’s transferable. Many of the skills are transferable from company to company. To be able to train them and give them a certificate that they could bring from company to company as they move, could be very valuable for them as their career grows.

Universities can play a role in that certification, in that training. I think it’s an opportunity for universities, its a good fit for universities, so I would encourage you to think about that, especially for offshore where the skills are tremendously unique and well suited for the community that we find here in Maine. Thank you.

President Ferrini‑Mundy:

Thank you for two very helpful observations. I’ll certainly follow up and learn more about the…and people here I’m sure know about the IEC renewable energy. Back to the question about students actually building things, I will put in a plug for our engineering college, whereas with many engineering colleges, there is a capstone experience in most of the majors, whereas seniors, the students actually do build something.

In fact, our latest engineering building on campus includes terrific almost maker space‑like space, with support from the shops that are around the perimeter of that room to do these projects. The point I wanted to be clear to make is that we’d like to partner with the private sector. If a company has something they’d like students to work on, we do have a way that that can happen at the University of Maine, and happy to follow up with individuals if you’re interested.

I am seeing people say that we are about at time and you’re ready for a break. I’m not sure I’m releasing you for the break, so don’t take that too literally. In any case, thank you so much for your time. It’s great to talk with you.