An Interview with William Cotta

Within Rhode Island we have virtually every aspect of the Blue Economy: fishing, defense, aquaculture, recreation and tourism, recreational boating, marine transportation, offshore energy and many others. But the ocean is not zoned like land is, it’s mostly open. This leads to a lot of conflict between users, which is a business challenge. Rhode Island spent a lot of time and effort dealing with this conflict with regards to the country’s first offshore wind farm at Block Island. We stand as a model for how to have different users of the ocean work together to find a path forward.

When you talk about the Blue Economy in Rhode Island you need to start with our state university. The University of Rhode Island is a great asset. One of the reasons that the Block Island Wind Farm was the first in the water is because of the work that University of Rhode Island (URI) and the state did in mapping out an area where the wind farm could go and understanding the different users of the ocean and how they can interact together.

Thanks to the work at URI, we were able to find a way for offshore energy to find a space in that ecosystem. When you look at where the industry is now, that is something that is still being figured out in many places, but Rhode Island stands as a model for how to make different users of the ocean work together to find a path forward.

I consider developing the offshore wind supply chain to be a multi-step process.

The first step is: Grow Locally. We have in Rhode Island so many great companies that are involved in the maritime industries and adjacent industries. We have a company like INSPIRE Environmental. They’re going out on the ocean doing benthic habitat surveys, subsea surveys, etc. They’re a natural fit. They were already providing the services that the offshore wind industry needed and they naturally moved into that industry and grew.

Then there are the companies in adjacent industries. Rhode Island Fast Ferry is a great example of that. They were in an adjacent industry of passenger transportation. They saw the opportunity in transportation for offshore wind; really a very similar field. Then they went out and got the intellectual property from Europe as far as the designs and processes for operating a crew transfer vessel, built it in Rhode Island and created Atlantic Wind Transfers as a crew transfer company. They started out as a world-class organization in offshore wind rather than going through a long learning curve to learn how to do it. By importing that intellectual property they built the modern and the right tool for the job.

Another example is electricians. We have a lot of electricians in Rhode Island who work on utility-scale power. It’s not a big difference for them to work at heights or work offshore. They went out and got the basic safety training they needed to work offshore and they were upskilled to do that. Whether those companies are in the maritime industry and can be upskilled or are in adjacent industries and we can help with that identification, we let them know that what’s out there and see where they fit in. We can help upskill or do capability audits to help companies find those gaps and be competitive to bid into the project. It’s still exploratory but it’s really replicating that “Fit for Offshore” model from the UK.

The second step is: Fill the Gaps. This is where we find the gaps that we have in the offshore wind supply chain and attract those companies to come and land here in Rhode Island. Examples of these are subsea engineering, subsea infrastructure, cable-laying, etc. You see companies with these skills in the Gulf of Mexico and in Europe. We want to attract those companies. Wherever we have gaps, we want to find somebody to fill those gaps. Those companies, in turn, will tap into the local supply chain. If a subsea engineer needs to fabricate something, they can do that in a Rhode Island shipyard. Anything from food in a local restaurant to uniforms to equipment, all that can be served by local companies as these out-of-state companies come in to fill that gap.

The third step is: Competing Regionally, as a Region. An example of this is with our ports. We have great ports here in Providence and Davisville, but the bridges on Narragansett Bay restrict some of the vessels that can operate here. But there are nearby ports in Massachusetts and Connecticut that don’t have that limitation and they can support those specific assets. Those ports may have other limitations, however, like having enough land around them to support the construction and pre-assembly of a wind farm. That’s what Rhode Island has. When we work as a region and we cooperate, we’re actually making ourselves more competitive. There are a lot of companies beyond construction that need warehouse space near the waterfront. They might make equipment that goes on the vessels but they don’t own vessels. Those are the companies that we want to attract to land in Rhode Island because they know that if a vessel comes in that they need to load out, they can do it at ProvPort, at Quonset/Davisville and hopefully soon at East Providence. But if all the RI ports are full or busy, they can go to Massachusetts or Connecticut. There are ample opportunities. And nowhere else on the East Coast has that kind of port infrastructure piece. That is a real asset for us.

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The last piece of that strategy is: Innovate Globally. We want to be a resource for the rest of the industry. You look at the established offshore wind industries in Denmark and the United Kingdom and see how they built offshore wind farms and the industries that grew around them. We’re going to develop some intellectual property ourselves and we can leverage our academic institutions. We can develop new ways to build wind farms that are more efficient and then export them back to Europe and hopefully we can contribute to emerging economies around the world as well.

Helping companies land and expand in Rhode Island,
we’re the state’s economic development agency.

The views and opinions expressed in this Offshore Source WebExclusive are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official position held by the Offshore Source editorial team.
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