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 segment, part six of 11, we will dive into the environmental and cultural considerations of developing floating turbines.

A number of long standing ocean users are, I think, understandably, quite concerned about the development of offshore wind energy.

It frankly represents probably the single biggest change in use of the U.S. continental shelves that most of us will see in our lifetimes.

There's going to be more permanent physical structures out in the water, and that's going to create operational and navigational challenges for, anyone just moving around or especially trying to catch fish out in the water.

It's also going to affect the environment in ways we don't fully understand.

So we expect that ocean currents will be altered.

And that's going to affect the distribution of nutrients and fish and lobster larvae and other plankton and other changes that, you know, the scientific community is speculating and hypothesizing about, and trying to figure out how we're going to measure and monitor those types of changes.

Trying to characterize the types of change that might happen with offshore wind farms in the Gulf of Maine is difficult, because a lot of the change is hard to characterize.

So you need specific studies, especially when it comes to the organisms and marine animals, in order to determine the change first, that if it is even occurring, and then if it's a temporary change or something, that's going to be long term and permanent.

And this is where what becomes very important is understanding what exists before offshore wind is developed.

In parallel to conducting new studies to understand the impacts groups in the region, like Noah Fisheries are working collaboratively to mitigate impacts on long term scientific surveys that already provide an understanding of the health of the ecosystem.

Most people probably understand what a wind turbine is by now that wind turbines are devices that extract kinetic energy out of the wind field and convert it to electricity.

So it's the exact same thing as what we see on land, except for the turbines are offshore.

Scientists, both locally and around the world are studying how this energy extraction, as well as ocean habitat modification, may impact ocean ecosystems and in turn, impact food chains and wildlife.

At this time, it's not known how many turbines would be placed in the Gulf of Maine, or exactly what their impact on the marine environment would be.

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.