If the global offshore wind industry is hitting some headwinds, it’s not so obvious at the Community College of Rhode Island.
Although situated inland in the Ocean State, the college’s Lincoln campus has been buzzing with a steady stream of students signed on to complete a basic safety training course that brings participants up to speed with international standards created by the Denmark-based Global Wind Organisation.
Since its launch in March, 91 students have gone through the basic safety training program, says Jaime Nash, executive director of workforce development operations at CCRI – most of whom completed the entirety of the five-module course, though some come to the program only needing parts of the training to fit their specific industry requirements.
“It’s not just the people constructing or maintaining the turbines” who enroll in the course, but people associated with this work, Nash said. “We are seeing people who are already employed within a skilled trade, or a profession where they need this training to expand their [skills] and work in offshore.”
They’re not necessarily local, either.
“We have a lot of people coming to visit Rhode Island for this,” Nash said, with the program having served participants from 14 additional states so far – often from the region, but others from states as far as Oregon, Texas, Michigan and Louisiana.
CCRI isn’t the only local institution that has in recent years created programming to serve the offshore industry. The University of Rhode Island last year established a graduate certificate program as an addition to its existing selection of offshore wind education initiatives. It also created a minor in offshore wind.
The university has also offered an “energy fellows” program since 2008, which includes offshore wind opportunities amid other sustainable energy education offerings.
URI did not immediately have detailed enrollment data for these programs. But the university’s Department of Ocean Engineering, which runs the certificate and minor programs and broadly overlaps with offshore efforts, has held steady at around 25 to 30 students per class over the past few years, according to Jason Dahl, the department chair.
That’s down from the program’s pre-COVID-19 high of around 40 students per class, Dahl said. But ocean engineering enrollment, as well as interest in offshore energy education, has come a long way since the department’s establishment in the 1990s, he says.
“There has been a significant increase in students who are particularly interested in not necessarily offshore wind, but offshore renewable energies” such as thermal, wave and tidal sources, Dahl said.
Across the state border, the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth has also delved into offshore wind education efforts, launching its offshore wind internships program, “Closing the Experience Gap,” in 2022.
UMass Dartmouth recently announced that it had graduated a cohort of students from that program, which is intended to last two years and is about to embark on another round. Students who went through the program have landed jobs with companies such as energy service company Avangrid Inc., undersea data collection company Jaia Robotics Inc. and nonprofit industry group New Bedford Ocean Cluster, the university says.
These increases to local programming – and, in CCRI’s case, what the college describes as a strong start in enrollment trends – come despite some turbulence amid the global offshore wind market.
A downturn is evident at Orsted A/S, the Danish offshore wind developer that bases its North American operations in Providence, which this year reported $575 million in impairment losses partially tied to a construction delay on the Revolution Wind project. Located off the Rhode Island coast, that project is slated to supply wind energy to Rhode Island and Massachusetts.
Elsewhere in the U.S., other offshore wind projects have also suffered from economic headwinds and construction delays.
But Dahl doesn’t see these hardships as impacting local enrollment in offshore wind education initiatives.
“In our program, I’m not sure that the economic trends related to offshore wind are necessarily driving our enrollment,” Dahl said, noting that university infrastructure also has significant sway over an engineering student’s path.
For instance, URI’s Department of Ocean Engineering, which is based at the Narragansett Bay campus, is the only specialization among URI’s eight engineering programs that doesn’t have facilities in the university’s $125 million engineering building, which opened in 2019.
But Dahl believes the Department of Ocean Engineering will have a comparable resource in the foreseeable future, noting that the state and university see “strong potential with the offshore wind industry” and have invested accordingly.
A new building for ocean engineering is currently in the design phase, as approved under a 2022 statewide ballot measure authorizing a $100 million bond supporting the Bay campus. That facility will include new research infrastructure, research tanks, offices and classroom spaces that Dahl predicts “will be a big draw for increasing enrollment.”
At CCRI, Nash speculates that the offshore wind basic safety training enrollment also benefits from its relative uniqueness amid what’s still considered a fledgling industry.
Not many institutions offer this type of training, and the course packs a five-part module into three days, which Nash said people seem willing to squeeze into their schedules on short notice.
“We get a lot of requests [to enroll] very close to the start of training,” Nash said. “In a lot of cases, these opportunities come, and they’re on the table for a short period of time, or [participants] are trying to fit it in between projects and assignments, so in that case, they’re willing to travel to get what they need.”
