Aziz Ezzat Receives USDOT and NJSG Funding for Offshore Wind Projects

Projects include the electrification of transportation vessels for offshore operations and predicting the presence of North Atlantic right whales near offshore wind farms

As an assistant professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering and the director of the Renewables and Industrials Analytics (RIA) research group, Aziz Ezzat has received funding by the National Science Foundation and the US Department of Energy for recent projects exploring offshore wind forecasting, operations, and maintenance (O&M).

Additionally, through collaboration with Blue Ocean Transfers (BOT), he recently received grant funding from the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) - Maritime Administration (MARAD), Office of Environment and Innovation through the Maritime Environmental and Technical Assistance program to lead Rutgers’ scope for a project titled “Investigation of the Advancement of the Decarbonization of Offshore Wind Support Vessels” that aligns with and builds on his earlier projects. A subsidiary of the marine transportation services firm McQuilling Partners, Inc., BOT is a US flag shipping company that caters to the US offshore wind industry with Jones Act compliant crew transport and transfer services. 

Predicting Meteorological and Oceanographic (Met-ocean) Conditions to inform Offshore Wind Operations

“We’re very excited to collaborate with domain experts in BOT who have an ambitious vision to enable the electrification of American-made crew transfer vessels or CTVs, which are the workhorses of offshore wind operations and maintenance,” Ezzat says.

Ezzat also collaborates with co-PI Josh Kohut, a professor at the Rutgers School of Environmental and Biological Sciences (SEBS).

“Operability analysis, which means predicting the safe weather windows that CTVs can navigate in,” says Ezzat, “is a key aspect of ensuring offshore wind farms are highly available, while also ensuring the safety of crews and equipment transport.”

He defines Rutgers’ role in the project as one that focuses on the design, development, and implementation of a “probabilistic data science model for the offshore met-ocean conditions and operability windows experienced by CTVs, and their impact on key O&M metrics, such as accessibility, environmental footprint, efficiency, and cost.”

He adds, “The vision of this project is to recreate the success of electric vehicles, or EVs, but this time, the ‘V’ in ‘EV’ would stand for a vessel.”

Predicting the Presence of North Atlantic Right Whales

Ezzat is leading another project titled “Unlocking Wind/Whale Co-Existence Through Artificial Intelligence,” a second collaborative project with Kohut that has received a $210,000 grant from the New Jersey Sea Grant Consortium (NJSG).

“Our goal is to design and test new predictive analytics, enabled by advances in spatio-temporal machine learning and artificial intelligence, to learn about the complex habitat of the North Atlantic right whale near offshore wind energy areas in the mid-Atlantic,” explains Ezzat.

The methods and models developed by the team will be critical for predicting the probability of an encounter with a North Atlantic right whale during the construction and operation of offshore wind farms.

“While recently there have been rising concerns about the potential negative impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), this project is an exemplar of how AI/ML can contribute positively to responsible and nature-inclusive economic growth by ensuring that offshore wind farms are developed and operated in the most environmentally benign way,” Ezzat concludes.