Yesterday, BOEM officially launched the POWERON (Partnership for an Offshore Wind Energy Regional Observation Network) program, and partnerships with RWSC and NOAA Fisheries to implement it. RWSC will receive $4 million over 3 years to lead the program.
Offshore wind lessees can now make annual contributions to POWERON to have their long-term passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) requirements fulfilled. Annual POWERON contributions will cover the cost of instrumentation, vessel time, data processing, and analysis. Contributions will also cover the costs of archiving data at a public passive acoustic data repository hosted by the National Centers for Environmental Information. To date, three offshore wind energy projects have opted-in to POWERON: Revolution Wind and South Fork Wind (both Ørsted projects), and Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind (a Dominion Energy project).
The RWSC Marine Mammal Subcommittee will play a key role in implementing the program in collaboration with BOEM, NOAA Fisheries, the Navy, and other PAM funders and practitioners. To implement the program, RWSC will develop a collaborative Annual PAM Field Plan, PAM Data Plan, oversee and ensure consistent collection and management of PAM data funded via the program, and make raw data and data products publicly available at 6-month intervals.
The RWSC Marine Mammal Subcommittee has been coordinating PAM deployments on the Atlantic OCS since early 2022, including via regular Subcommittee meetings, by hosting a PAM Workshop in September 2023, and holding PAM coordination meetings for individual subregions of the RWSC study area (Southern New England in June 2023 and NY/NJ Bight in May 2024 and September 2024). Participants in these activities have provided RWSC with coordinates of planned and deployed PAM sensors for display on the RWSC Research Planning Map.
Learn more at https://rwsc.org/pam.