The Winds of Change: Offshore Wind Open House & Union Apprenticeship Awareness Day

The Offshore Wind Open House & Union Apprenticeship Awareness Day event was featured on News12. Video credit News12.

The Center of Excellence in Wireless and Information Technology (CEWIT) hosted the Offshore Wind Open House and Union Apprenticeship Awareness Day event on Thursday, August 1, 2024.

Organized by the New York State Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) in concert with Stony Brook University's Economic Development, the event gave aspiring apprentices and community members the opportunity to engage with representatives from New York State agencies, offshore wind workforce development partners, and Long Island labor unions. Over 200 attendees gathered at the CEWIT building where they spoke with members from the major offshore wind companies  Ørsted, Community Offshore Wind, Empire Wind, and Equinor about New York State's growing offshore wind infrastructure.

Attendees of the event had the opportunity to try an official offshore wind virtual reality training program using Meta Quest VR headsets provided by Stony Brook Economic Development.

The VR program tasked users with scaling a virtual wind turbine in the Atlantic Ocean and identifying malfunctions on the wind turbine. This program is a valuable training module that both educates trainees and generates interest and awareness of the career paths with offshore wind.

Attendee using the Offshore Wind VR Training program. Photo credit John Griffin.

Continuing with the VR demonstrations, attendees were given access to CEWIT's world renowned Reality Deck and SMART Cluster immersive displays. The Reality Deck is a 30-foot-by-40-foot room covered with 416 27-inch screens, each with 4 million pixels to create a high-definition 1.6-billion pixel displey, the largest in the world. Saeed Boorboor, PhD, CEWIT's Principal Research Scientist, demonstrated the capabilities of the Reality Deck by immersing spectators in a 360-degree model of a stormwater surge forecast model. This particular model allows researchers to assess coastal areas susceptible to stormwater surge flooding, allowing agencies to make more informed decisions in preparation of incoming hurricanes and floods.

Attendee using the SMART Cluster at CEWIT. Photo credit John Griffin.

The Strategic Machine-Learning Acceleration and Ray Tracing (SMART) Cluster is a dual use GPU Cluster, for both machine-learning and visualization, which is the fastest among New York State academic institutions. Much like the reality deck, the SMART Cluster can process large amounts of data, like weather forecasting models, to make calculated decisions in stormwater and hurricane safety and prevention.

While the open house took place on the second floor of CEWIT, the Taste of the Trades Summer Youth Employment program was being led by Stony Brook Economic Development's Workforce Development Manager Derek O'Connor. The seven-week summer program, in collaboration with NYSERDA, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Suffolk Community College, Suffolk County Department of Labor, and Haugland Group LLC, focuses on educating 20 high school juniors from NYSERDA-designated underserved school districts about construction, energy transmission, and other key components of the regional economy and will be paid for their hands-on experience.

As the last day of the two-week section of the program where the students spent time at Stony Brook University learning about power-grid essentials, the students had the opportunity to speak with the various representatives and union leaders to learn more about possible career pathways to offshore wind.

Raising awareness of innovative technologies, and inspiring and educating the next generation, is essential to the economic development of Long Island. Stony Brook University's Economic Development looks forward to continuing to partner with New York agencies for future workforce development events.