Offshore wind farms are becoming part of America and the world's renewable energy landscape.

And now the Gulf of Maine is being considered a possible site for offshore wind development.

In this series of stories, you'll learn about this emerging technology and what it might mean for you, our coastal communities and the Gulf of Maine's natural environment.

In this story, part two of 11.

We'll dive into the wind turbine technology that is being considered for the Gulf of Maine.

The way a wind turbine works is very similar to an airplane.

And so you've got air that's blowing across the horizontally across the ground, and you put a wind turbine up.

And what it does is it it the wind flows through the rotor, which is the part of the wind turbine that has the the blades connected to it.

And it's, it's spinning around.

And as the wind goes through the rotor, it converts that kinetic energy that that's moving air through that rotor into, a mechanical force.

And then that mechanical force is converted into electricity.

So if you look at a regular wind turbine today, they're pretty much agreed on a standard design.

It's a three bladed wind turbine horizontal axis we say.

The wind flows through it.

It's supported by a tube tower.

And then that tube tower goes into a substructure that that's what we call it.

The substructure is the part of the machine that's usually below the water or at the water line.

And that connects the wind turbine to the seabed.

There are several wind farms under construction or operating off the U.S. East Coast, all of which are fixed to the sea floor.

So Gulf of Maine is an interesting, an interesting case.

Things started here in Massachusetts with technology that's, current technology, which is fixed bottom.

So this means that the offshore wind structures are connected to the seabed.

And that's the dominant technology globally.

However, there's a new technology that can, accommodate much deeper waters, like the waters we have in the Gulf of Maine.

And that's, referred to as floating offshore wind technology.

In the Gulf of Maine that substructure has to be a buoyant substructure.

It's floating because the water's too deep.

And so that buoyant substructure is much, it's much more like a boat.

And so then that's on the top of the surface.

And what we want to do is minimize how much the boat rocks.

And, and we do that by hydrodynamic designs that the engineers come up with.

And then we suspend that and connect it to the seabed with mooring lines.

But this allows us to go further away from shore.

It allows us to go into deeper water and and the bigger turbines allow us to generate more electricity per turbine so we can generate as much energy as a nuclear power plant with one wind farm.

And so that's a significant change from what people probably used to think about little wind turbines.

The challenge with floating wind turbines is that this technology is very new and it's hard to fully understand how the mooring lines and cable and inter-array cables are going to interact with fishing gear.

Because these are fluid, these are dynamic cables that are moving in the water column.

And they have to have a certain amount of extra line because they need to be able to adjust for differences in wave height, especially storm events.

One of the big things, though, is the way, the mooring system is designed so that one of the things we can do is to actually, reduce the the amount of space that it takes up.

We call it the footprint.

So the anchor circle can be made a lot smaller with good engineering design.

And we're working on some of those ideas now.

Engineers are working on design improvements on the turbine, the buoyant substructure and the mooring lines to take up less space in the ocean.

They're working to make energy capture more efficient and prepare for more intense storms in the future.

But everybody should know that a wind turbine even the the the regular wind turbines that you see along the coast, they're already designed to withstand a 150 mile an hour wind.

So we just have to decide if that's enough or if we can, if we need to maybe increase that amount.

The Winds of Change in the Gulf of Maine series is a co-production of New Hampshire PBS and New Hampshire Sea Grant with support from the University of New Hampshire.

Production funding was provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.