It's WINDSday | April 24, 2024
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Celebrating the Power of Wind, Clean Energy and a Green Environment | |
CVOW Monopiles Set to Sail for Project Site in Early May; Massachusetts Now Receiving Electricity From Offshore Wind | |
Dominion Energy's CVOW project is moving forward, with monopile foundation pieces scheduled to head out from Portsmouth to a large site 27 miles off the coast of Virginia Beach in May, with the entire 176 turbine operation due for completion in late 2026. | |
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A smaller but no less complex wind farm called Vineyard 1 off Cape Cod is expected to be fully up and running two years earlier. Several of its 62 turbines are now spinning and generating 68mw (of an eventual 800mw) of electricity to power 30,000 homes and businesses in Massachusetts. And it's having a significant economic impact on that state, as the video details.
"We are watching what is happening off New York and New England," says David White, Executive Director of the Norfolk-based VA Maritime Association. "It's further evidence of the economic potential offshore wind presents for the region by building off the expertise and capabilities of Virginia's maritime industry."
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Vineyard 1 Offshore Windfarm site off Massachusetts | |
JMU/VT Team Ready for Minnesota Wind Competition | |
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A combined team of Dukes and Hokies (JMU and VA Tech) have met and prepped to bring a national championship to the Commonwealth.
No, it's not in baseball, basketball, or badminton. These talented undergrads, beginning in August, united to take on the likes of Cal Poly, Johns Hopkins, Texas Tech, CCNY, Rice, Penn State, and the Universities of Colorado, K-State, and Wisconsin in the National Collegiate Wind Competition on May 5-9 in Minneapolis. (Read here)
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Our correspondent and VT team member, Virginia Beach senior Jaedyn Williams, reports that the JMU students have driven down I-81 to Blacksburg to see the turbine prototype the Hokie kids designed and compare notes on the total team output.
"The collaboration has gone well! It has been exciting working with another university and planning outreach events in both college towns."
We will, of course, report on how Jaedyn, her fellow Beach native, JMU's Georgia Barefoot, and the rest of the budding engineers and other scholars fare in Minnesota. Here's hoping the "Wind Will Blow Their Way!"
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Girls Learn How to Move Into and Up in the Engineering Field | |
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The 125 students from Chesapeake, Portsmouth, Isle of Wight, York, and Gloucester Counties who toured Portsmouth Marine Terminal (PMT) recently as part of Girls Lead Offshore Wind (a joint WINDSdays/HR Workforce Council initiative) saw a lot and learned even more from their guides.
One of them was Lisa Flittner of Skanska, an international firm that is demolishing approximately 1,500 linear feet of wharf at PMT, driving 1,333 36" square solid piles up to 188' long, pouring 25,000 cubic yards of new concrete deck, and placing 200,000 tons of stone aggregate on roughly 72 acres of backlands. "I'm the assistant project manager," Lisa told the girls who wanted to know how she reached that lofty position at age 34.
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"When I was in high school, first in south Florida and then Northern Virginia, I discovered that I really liked math," she said. "I went to college in West Virginia where I participated in a big concrete industry competition and decided I wanted to be in that field."
With Skanska the past nine years, Lisa has worked on four major projects, including the new Midtown Tunnel. "At $220-million, the PMT assignment is actually the smallest of the group." A wife and mom of two, she lives in Virginia's Northern Neck but is in Hampton Roads on weeknights through 2026 as admittedly one of the lone females in the field, a situation that is changing.
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This day, the GLOW group was also able to query other women in the offshore wind field and assess whether bringing energy, transportation, or other major infrastructure efforts to life is right for them, as it has been for Lisa Flittner.
You Go Girls!
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Superheroes Ice Cream
is a Brilliant Child's Dream
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Out of the mouths of babes.
Four-year-old Brantley Ferguson watched his father Coleman going around the region, rating ice cream parlors on social media. "Daddy, if you have your own store, we won't have to pay for ice cream." Sweet, but it got his parents thinking. "Let's open one," and to be kid- and copyright-friendly, we should create our own superhero characters.
Coleman and wife Amberly, both Beach natives, got to work. They became Capt. Frostbite and Agent Frostbabe. Brantley is Blizzard Boy.
The family leased space outside Lynnhaven Mall, and in summer 2022, Superheroes Ice Cream was born.
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Two years later there are also "villains," Cone Crusher and Sour Milk Man. And the caped Scooper Heroes are filling hundreds of cones with 16 permanent flavors like Hulk's Underwear, Donkey Kong's Breakfast, Milk Dud and When in Doubt, Twinkie Out. There are also eight rotating ones, such as a vegan variety, Pop Start Swirl, and Chocolate Pretzel. Not bad branding for a guy who had never made his own ice cream until he began selling it. | |
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"I worked in ABC stores before opening a shop next to one called Mix It Up, a tap room that COVID killed," says Coleman. Amberly commenced a wedding venue called Gala 417 off Great Neck Road. It's still running, like the Colemans who are superpreneurs as well as the lucky parents of a precocious preschooler with one business under his belt.
Credit Mom and Dad, though, for the membership program ($9.99 a month entitles you to a free scoop each visit plus gratis use of the party room), and everyone can play the video games at no charge. Is this worth a drive to North Mall Drive? To your kids or grands, you'll be one cool superhero if you do.
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Sierra Club Out Front on Offshore Wind | |
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WINDSday Partner, the Sierra Club, was enthusiastically promoting renewable energy this past Saturday at VA Beach Parks and Recreation's Earth Day event at Mt. Trashmore.
Volunteers answered questions about both Dominion Energy's CVOW and Avangrid's proposed Kitty Hawk projects, which together will make the region a hub for wind energy jobs, a Sierra Club priority.
E-mail Eileen Woll, the Club's Offshore Energy Program Director, at eileen.woll@sierraclub.org, to get involved.
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Stay connected with WINDSday via Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn | |
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E-mail season@windsdays.com to learn how to become a WINDSday Partner.
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