Wednesday, August 3, 2011

Cleantech industry finds a natural home in Maine

By Lori Valigra, Mass High Tech correspondent

Maine’s 3,500-mile coastline, rugged mountains and abundance of trees make it a natural location for cleantech, and crafty New Englanders already are making a mark on the international stage in tidal and wind power.

“Where Maine can take leadership positions in clean technology it gets attention,” said John Spritz, new executive director of the Technology Association of Maine (TechMaine) in Portland. “People think, ‘They care more about it,’ so it ups the street credibility. It’s a strength for us.”

Spritz also credits former U.S. Senator Edmund Muskie for his crafting of the Clean Water Act, which was passed in 1972 and was inspired by the then-polluted Androscoggin River in Maine.

Other factors about the state are pushing it toward clean energy, both to produce it and to use it. “Maine is a heavily oil-dependent state. Eighty percent of our heating is by oil, and we are heavily car-dependent,” said Harry Brown, executive director of Environmental and Energy Technology Council of Maine (E2 Tech),  an industry group in South Portland.

Brown’s group is working on repurposing part of the recently decommissioned Brunswick Naval Air Station, now a business park called Brunswick Landing, into a renewable energy park. Patterned after the University of California at Irvine’s Research Power Park, the energy part of the park would be an incubator for renewable energy businesses to relocate to Maine and conduct R&D and light manufacturing. It’s still in the conceptual phase, Brown said, but one idea is to use the park’s existing infrastructure as a plug-and-play environment so, for example, a hydrogen fuel cell company could demonstrate the viability of its new, untried energy technology by attaching its product to the park’s grid and supply power to other firms located there.

The grant application for the energy park’s feasibility study noted that nearby Massachusetts and Connecticut “are positioning themselves to capture this emerging economic opportunity by immediately deploying business development mechanisms in the energy arena.”

According to a recent Brookings Institution report, Maine has 12,212 clean jobs, or 2 percent of all jobs in the state, and ranks 44th nationwide in the size of its clean economy.
Despite the comparably small size — due to Maine’s small economy — the industry is growing steadily, with the state adding 2,914 cleantech jobs between 2003 and 2010, up 4 percent annually, and with each job producing $14,158 in exports. The median annual wage in the sector is $36,460, higher than the $34,393 for all jobs in Maine.

Among the sample Maine employers Brookings pointed to were Cianbro Corp. of Pittsfield, for the firm’s green architecture and construction services; Casco-based Hancock Lumber Co., for providing sustainable forest products; Portland’s Ocean Renewable Power Company LLC (ORPC), which is working on tidal power in the Downeast area; Tom’s of Maine Inc. of Kennebunk, which provides green consumer products; and Portland’s Woodard & Curran Inc., a professional environmental services firm. An Orono company, Cerahelix LLC, which is developing technology for reuse and recycling of water in industrial processes, is a finalist in the 2011 MassChallenge startup competition, and CEO Susan MacKay is a 2011 MHT Women to Watch honoree.

For its part, ORPC already has drawn national and international attention for its pre-commercial work on a large tidal energy installation off of Eastport. John Ferland, vice president of project development at ORPC in Portland, said the company still expects to start the Maine Tidal Energy Project this year by installing a commercial TidGen tidal generation power system in Cobscook Bay. It first must get a pilot license and general permit, expected late this year, and then will deploy the project in March 2012. After running and monitoring the initial system for a year, ORPC will install more power systems over the ensuing three years to increase the project’s capacity to 3 megawatts, enough electricity to power 1,200 Maine homes and businesses.

But even before the pilot project starts, Ferland is claiming a strong economic benefit to Maine. “The impact to the state even before commercial operations has been more than $8 million into the Maine economy over the last four years and 100 jobs, plus a supply chain to 13 of the state’s 16 counties,” he said.

At the project site, the company is building around existing skills in the fishing and boat-building industries. That means creation of a new market and new companies in the Eastport area, he said. He cited Perry Marine & Construction, a construction management and assembly services company, and expansion of business by a local fisherman, Butch Harris, who is leasing vessels to ORPC.

ORPC has raised $38 million, more than half from the private sector and other money from the federal government and the Maine Technology Institute, which offers early stage capital. Once the company starts deploying its turbine, it will be connected to the primary power grid and be able to generate revenue. The pilot is expected to run eight years. No one in the country has a pilot license approval yet, Ferland said.

“This state has as a core culture of attention to environmental excellence and to have economic development fit into that,” Ferland added.

He said Maine is an early mover in support of the tidal energy business. Another cutting-edge cleantech project drawing on another of Maine’s strengths — composite technology development — is underway at the University of Maine’s AEWC Advanced Structures and Composites Center  in Orono. There, researchers are working on composite blades for offshore wind turbines, as well as conducting research on how such turbines interact with waves.

With a $12 million grant to the DeepCwind Consortium  — drawing funds from the U.S. Department of Energy, federal economic stimulus and other funding — the university is collaborating on R&D to understand floating offshore wind turbines, said Mark Kittridge, project manager at the university’s composites center.

The project studied a 1/50th scale model this spring in Marin, The Netherlands, and the next phase is to deploy a 1/35th scale turbine off  Monhegan Island next year. The model is an early part of the Maine Deepwater Offshore Wind Plan, which by 2030 aims to have a commercial floating wind farm off the Maine coast generating 5,000 megawatts of energy.

“The point of testing is to try to understand what happens when wind gusts and waves are interacting with the turbine system,” Kittridge said. The system will be placed 12 miles off the coast, where a 10-foot wave 1/3 scale, for example, would represent a 30-foot wave for a 5 megawatt turbine system.

The reason the university, known for its research on composites, is interested in the 200-foot turbine blades is that floating structures need to be significantly lighter weight. In a separate DOE-sponsored project, it is now looking at replacing thermosetting resin systems (the same material as outlet plastic covers on a wall) in current blades with thermoplastic resins, which also can be reformed. “We are still determining if there is a thermoplastic resin system that will work and be cost-effective,” he said. The DOE’s $250,000 grant is in the process of being extended for this feasibility study.

“We’ve seen land-based wind turbine systems here in Maine for a number of years. Maine has some areas with decent land-based wind,” Kittridge said. “But there are better wind resources offshore, with a potential of 160 gigawatts. This DeepCwind effort is leading the nation on the technology to develop and deploy floating wind turbine systems.”

 

Lori Valigra is a freelancer in Cambridge.