In music, science, and theatre classes, in research labs, in conservation efforts, and almost every corner of academia, there’s a growing awareness and dedication to community-engaged scholarship. How are different disciplines training up social justice-minded students to do no harm to the communities they work in? With one thriving relationship at a time.

A tree grows in Baltimore. Its roots push against the surface, its newly budding canopy blocks some of the dreary rain on this last day in March. The aphorism promises flowers soon, but the daffodils are already here, lush and golden against the wet grass. Rooted in this environment, the tree struggles to absorb water in a heavily-paved area. It faces possible invasive species, the whims of developers, a strike of lightning or disease.

These outside influences affect the flourishing of this tree, and the flourishing of the neighborhood it’s rooted in is just as interconnected. A tension, a balance, a system of reciprocity.  

In Franklin Square Park, on a parcel of land donated by developers to the southwest Baltimore neighborhood in 1839, this tree and 96 others were recently surveyed by UMBC students at the request of the Franklin Square Neighborhood Association. They wanted a catalog of their natural resources, but also a record of what they’ve lost—only seven of the original 149 trees on a 1916 map of the park remain.

Working with members of the neighborhood, Mariya Shcheglovitova, Ph.D. ’20, geography and environmental systems, and Bee Brown ’21, environmental science, and other UMBC student researchers began their work. Their project would rapidly expand from an arboreal park survey to a community-focused project that invited local kids to participate in a scavenger hunt and other activities to build on the students’ existing connection to the park. As Shcheglovitova and Brown discovered, “understanding park quality is dynamic and can only be partially captured in a survey of the park features. Historic accounts and a focus on what happens in a park can enrich our understanding of park quality.”

What began in Franklin Square as an effort to catalog trees—separate trunks with roots and canopies equally intermingling—broadened to encompass the community who interacts with the park the most. Acknowledging this interconnectedness in research of all types at UMBC is not new to academia but is becoming a more prominent approach to research as different disciplines wrestle with ways to train up social justice-minded students and do no harm to the communities they work in.

Bridging campus and community

Community-engaged research gives a name to this method. At UMBC, most service-learning and community engagement experiences are facilitated through The Shriver Center, which was founded nearly 30 years ago. Director Michele Wolff explains that in the early days, the Center emphasized “that higher ed institutions shouldn’t tell communities what they need. The partnership should be one of mutuality and reciprocity. So our focus should be listening to community partners, hearing where their gaps are and then being a resource to work with them to fill the gaps.”

This is still the Center’s primary mission, and in January 2020, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching honored UMBC with its distinguished Carnegie Community Engagement Classification, acknowledging UMBC faculty, staff, students, and partners for their deep commitment to strengthening the bonds between campus and community. 

As part of the application process, more than 120 campus partners and dozens of community partners underwent a rigorous self-study. Along the way, they found that in music, science, and theatre classes, in research labs, in conservation efforts, and almost every corner of academia, there’s a growing awareness and dedication to community-engaged scholarship. Wolff sees this movement come alongside “an increased appreciation of disparities, racial inequities, and other social justice issues. At the same time, people have been working on increasing appreciation and inclusion of community members as experts, or thinking about what counts as scholarly work.”

Some departments are working on ways to adopt these methods, and others have this ethos baked into their core. American studies, one of the original majors at UMBC, calls community-based research and engagement one of the “signatures” of the major. With its joint focus on “coupled natural and human systems,” geography and environmental systems (GES) is another department that recognizes the necessity and power of community-engaged scholarship.

Slow scholarship

“In the field of environmental justice, it’s absolutely assumed and expected that you’re going to do community-engaged research,” says Dawn Biehler, a GES professor who first became aware of the concept as a graduate student. “More and more people are realizing that this is important and a good way of doing research, but to do it really well takes so much time and you have to be brave, in a way.” 

As an academic, says Biehler, you have to honestly assess if your career—the timing of publications and tenure-track expectations—will suffer from this process. “It takes time to build genuine relationships with the community,” she continues. After engagement and research, then you still need to publish, and all of this takes more time than many instructors have allotted in their balance of research and teaching. “The other thing you have to recognize is that the people in the community you’re working with, they’re exposed to risks all the time, just a different set of risks,” says Biehler.

Institutionally, UMBC is changing to reflect community-engaged research as a priority. In May 2019, the Faculty Senate successfully proposed new language to include evaluation of community-engaged scholarship in the promotion and tenure policy for all departments, says Donald Snyder, chair of the committee that spearheaded the policy change and a lecturer in media and communications studies.

Still, even with the university’s acknowledgement of this methodology, why would professors or students voluntarily choose the inherently riskier, if not just slower, approach to research? 

Wolff highlights two affective or social emotional competencies she hopes students take from their time in community work—perspective taking and shared humanness. “What better place to develop and grow (those competencies) than in experiences where you have the opportunity to work with others who are different from yourself and in contexts that are different from the ones you’re used to?” asks Wolff.

Intersectional research

As a doctoral student, Shcheglovitova was known as “the person who cared about trees and social justice in the city,” so she wasn’t surprised when undergraduate student Bee Brown approached her to collaborate on a research project that interwove those topics.

Biehler’s multi-year connection with the Franklin Square community, says Shcheglovitova, gave neighborhood folks someone to approach who was willing to listen and respond about local environmental issues and allowed her and Brown to more easily gain the trust of the people involved.

Scott Kashnow, vice president of the Franklin Square Neighborhood Association, wanted an updated survey of the park’s trees that could inform future plantings in the park. Looking at historical photos and a 1916 map of the park, it’s clear a lot has changed in the past 100 years. Park features have disappeared or degraded—the once bubbling fountain is planted over, the park bathroom is boarded shut, and many of the area’s ash trees were decimated by an invasive insect species. 

After the survey was completed, Kashnow came up with the idea to invite students from a local school to celebrate the work and take part in the ongoing research. Shcheglovitova, Brown, and Biehler took the opportunity to gain a deeper understanding into community relationships with the park space.

“This is a way research can actually be helpful to the community,” says Kashnow, a Franklin Square resident for 14 years. “Through various organizations, we’ve been studied so much and oftentimes the studies don’t make any tangible difference in people’s lives. And people are still very happy to participate, you know, everybody has opinions, they love to talk about them. But does the research actually translate to some difference in people’s lives?”

Orchestrating social change

Regardless of the discipline, successful community-engaged scholarship depends on sustained relationships over time. Brian Kaufman, associate professor of music, sees grade school music teachers as great examples of this practice. Unlike other academic subjects in grade school where students have new instructors each year, music teachers interact with the same student musicians year after year. So it naturally follows for Kaufman that his music education students at UMBC should commit to a school for longer than a semester. 

Through the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra initiative OrchKids (and with the support of The Shriver Center), UMBC students work with Kaufman at Booker T. Washington Middle School in West Baltimore for two years at a time. “It’s unusual for student teachers to spend four semesters at the same school, but to really build relationships with students, to see them develop, this is necessary,” Kaufman says, not just for the middle school students, but his UMBC students as well. 

Pre-COVID, (although they have continued the program virtually) this would mean seven to 10 site visits to the school per semester. UMBC students spend the first half of the visit observing the teacher or engaging with the class, and the last hour spent in guided reflection. 

“To me,” shares Kaufman, “that’s where the juicy part comes in.” Before heading back to campus in a Shriver Center van, Kaufman says, “we sit down and talk about what we learned. And we really try to unpack our experience and make connections to some bigger issues—issues of equity, and these larger discussions about teaching in the field and service-learning in the city and how these things tie together. That’s where the real richness comes in for the students.”

Science on the stage

If music education lends itself naturally to following a community-engaged process, what about cross-disciplinary initiatives like Erin Lavik and Lynn Watson’s project Theatre Arts and Communicating Science? Lavik, professor in the department of chemical, biochemical, and environmental engineering, and Watson, a theatre professor, collaborated with Arbutus Middle School science teachers to use theatre skills—playwriting, improvisation, and voice/speech—to help their young students tell stories about their capstone science projects.

Lavik had personally experienced the powerful interplay between STEM and theatre in her own studies, she says, “So I wanted to create a program that helped college students tell the story of their science and let them engage with students in middle school who were vulnerable to losing their passion in science.” When she approached Watson about the idea, the theatre professor was  thrilled. “We shared an understanding of the power of theatrical storytelling that can bring communities of people together,” says Watson.

Prior to the program, the UMBC undergraduate and graduate engineering and theatre students spent a preparatory weekend workshopping with science teachers at Arbutus Middle School. Lavik and Watson saw the Retrievers’ confidence and community-building efforts gain steam over the weekend which led to a more successful outcome when they worked with the middle schoolers.

The students ultimately used a playwriting exercise to understand the plight of endangered species and improv scenarios to demonstrate the real world effects of Newton’s Laws of Motion—all of this performed with joy, says Watson. She noticed that the experience also “had a tremendous impact on the UMBC students in terms of confidence in their abilities as leaders and their ability to take action in contributing to the wider community, including outside the university.”

Before their joint project in January 2020, Lavik and Watson were both interested in the concept of community-engaged programming, but they attribute the successful launch of their vision to The Shriver Center. After the fact, Lavik observed that community-engaged scholarship can increase student retention—the stipends attached to the program, made possible by a Charlesmead Initiative for Arts Education grant, afforded students the time to participate. “I hope that over time, we will be able to show that programs that integrate arts and science can help students thrive at UMBC, and bringing these programs to our communities can increase the number of students, particularly from underrepresented populations, who can begin to see themselves as scientists and engineers with joy.”

Changing university culture

UMBC’s Center for Democracy and Civic Life has been instrumental in creating a campus culture of an engaged community—promoting equitable off-campus partnerships while emphasizing the importance of starting that process within the communities at UMBC. The Center’s Director David Hoffman, Ph.D. ’13, language, literacy, and culture, and Assistant Director Romy Hübler ’09, MLL, M.A. ’11, intercultural communications, Ph.D. ’15, LLC, say that an initiative that precedes the formalization of the Center is the BreakingGround grant program.

The origins of BreakingGround came from an effort to organize a UMBC Civic Year in 2012, says Hoffman, when “we discovered all of these people who were doing amazing things.” Greg Simmons, M.P.P. ’04, vice president of institutional advancement, challenged the group to think bigger, remembers Hoffman. “He said, ‘you know, you’re talking about this as a year, but this really is about UMBC’s identity. This is a place where we come together because we want to change the world and we want to change it in particular ways that align with values like inclusive excellence.’”

Hoffman, along with Wolff and others, recognized that community-engaged work was happening in classrooms, at service-learning sites, and in other campus settings, but there wasn’t a unifying structure for like-minded people to find each other easily. Through a sustaining grant from the provost’s office, BreakingGround has offered grants to 80 applicants to infuse courses and programs with opportunities for students to develop civic agency, and to shape their experiences so they’re not “just a one-off community service project, but an opportunity for lasting community engagement,” says Hoffman.

Hübler joined the BreakingGround working group in 2012 as the community liaison for the Graduate Student Association, and as a result of her involvement changed the topic of her dissertation. “I noticed among graduate students from all these different disciplines that many of us were drawn to our topics of study because we either had personal experience with them or we lived in communities where we would observe the effects of bad policy on people and centuries of oppression and marginalization.”

In 2013, UMBC began sending delegations to the Imagining America conference, which, according to the group’s mission, brings together people in higher education, non profit organizations, and activists to “imagine, study, and enact a more just and liberatory ‘America’ and world.” Imagining America’s leaders were struck by the holistic vision described by UMBC participants. “They saw how we were changing the university’s culture,” says Hübler. “Like this was not just one faculty member doing this in this discipline and another one over here, and they’re not communicating, but they could see that this was an organized effort.” 

As a result, UMBC was asked to bring the 2015 conference to Baltimore. Hübler and others began to reach out to partners to co-organize workshops around the city. “What is the story that we want to tell of Baltimore?” Hübler would ask. “We didn’t want it to be UMBC saying, ‘this is the story,’ right? But we came up with the story together.” In between planning the conference and the actualization of the work, Freddie Gray died in police custody in April 2015. Uprisings shook the city and caused UMBC to conduct a campus-wide inventory of Baltimore-based engagement, and that accounting ultimately strengthened the intentionality to focus community-based activities on racial equity. One of the most significant outcomes of that reckoning would come in 2017, with the establishment of the Truth, Racial Healing, & Transformation Campus Center at UMBC, which works to break down racial hierarchies with a focus on the university’s service-learning and community-engagement partnerships in Baltimore City.

Importantly, Hübler notes that UMBC is, in fact, its own community and should apply the same community-engaged best practices internally. “There are challenges we have,” she says, “and UMBC can be better. We are constantly making and co-creating UMBC. Students are not just customers floating through to get a degree, but we all have responsibility for our own community. And if we want to co-create our space, there are skills, knowledge, and dispositions that we need that are pretty much the same as what we need when we work with communities elsewhere.”

Good stewardship

Alumna Briana Yancy always envisioned herself following a typical research path, as she thought of it, a scientist in a lab. So she was surprised when she found herself on her third trip to the Bahamas as a part of biological sciences Professor Kevin Omland’s lab studying the Bahama Oriole. Yancy and the other students working with Omland partnered with The Bahamas National Trust, and she says the local community was always excited to talk about their orioles, showing them nests and asking insightful questions.

“I started to see how important this community connection is,” says Yancy, now the diversity work group staffer at the Chesapeake Bay Program, a collective of organizations whose shared mission is to protect the Chesapeake Bay. “It’s important that scientists and researchers learn how to work with local communities and how to talk about the things that they’re working on, especially for the environmental field, because it impacts everybody. If you can’t articulate that, people aren’t going to care and they’re not going to try to make a difference or get involved.”

Yancy ’19, M27, environmental science, says Omland set an example in the Bahamas that she’s tried to emulate since in her own work. “He always made sure to invite people along, to take the time to explain things to people, and also stop to get their insight,” says Yancy. As an intern at the National Aquarium checking water quality in the harbor, Yancy remembers, “people would always come up to me and be like, ‘Oh, what are you doing?’ And I would take the time to explain to them, ‘I’m doing this. This is what this machine is called. And this is how I do it, the numbers I’m looking for, and why it’s important.’” 

In her current position, Yancy sees an increased attention toward community-engaged research as organizations like the Chesapeake Bay Program ask themselves how they can reach a more diverse audience. “If we keep getting engagement from the same people from the same walks of life, we’re going to miss things,” says Yancy. “And we really can’t afford to miss anything. Climate change is now and the environment is struggling. And I think that, especially with COVID, we’re seeing more clearly the intricate connection between environmental health and public health.”

Moving toward the ideal

What does it mean to engage in relationships that encourage mutual flourishing? How can the roots and the canopy both benefit and nourish the good of the one tree? This is a question The Shriver Center and their partners at UMBC have been asking themselves and the thousands of students who use the Center’s service-learning structure to engage with the surrounding Baltimore County and City communities for the past 30 years.

Wolff sees community-engaged scholarship as a step away from transactional partnerships to transformational ones. The ideal, she says, should be to include the community from start to finish so everyone benefits.

“We’re recognizing community members as experts and moving forward with a goal of reciprocity and mutuality in our work,” says Wolff. “Part of the ideal is having community members be a part of every aspect of the activity. That’s where we want to get to. I think we’re moving toward that ideal.”

*****
Illustrations by Rebecca Bradley.

One of the things that makes UMBC great is how wonderful our alumni, students, faculty, and staff are. Because of these amazing people, UMBC often finds itself “in the news,” so each week, we’ll be sharing with you a round-up of the most newsworthy achievements from our community.

• Dr. Hrabowski appeared on Comcast Newsmakers to stress the importance of inclusiveness in STEM fields.
• Erle Ellis, geography and environmental systems, told The Guardian that all human activity, even our conservation efforts, has an impact on how species evolve.
• Thomas Schaller, political science, discussed the Republican party’s shift towards the right in The Week.
• Marie DesJardins, computer science, tells us how we can integrate computer science education into the nationwide K-12 curriculum, providing more opportunities for female and minority students in the process.
• Patricia Joseph, former special assistant to the Provost, along with her husband Mark, have promised a $3 million gift to the Baltimore Museum of Art to help pay some of the costs of the museum’s new center for education and creativity.
• Light Point Security, a cybersecurity company founded by former NSA employees and based at bwtech@UMBC, is profiled in the Baltimore Sun.
• Women’s volleyball beat Hartford 3-0 on Sunday, while women’s soccer scored a 2-0 victory over New Hampshire for their Senior Day game.

For more newsmaking moments and campus updates, check out UMBC Insights!

UMBC is at the center of Maryland’s growing  efforts to harness the energy of the wind.

Ocean City is the Maryland destination most associated with the summer. But some- day the resort may also be known for a nearby wind farm that could help the state put a dent in its greenhouse gas emissions and the rising costs of generating power.

Both this summer and last summer, UMBC scientists, using a remote sensing technology called LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging), have been helping the state of Maryland in wind resource assessment efforts to develop the state’s wind energy farms in the Atlantic Ocean near Ocean City.

The project is part of a plan envisioned by Maryland’s legislature in a new law – the Maryland Offshore Wind Energy Act – passed in the 2013 legislative session and signed by Governor Martin O’Malley. The legislation calls for the establishment of a facility at least 10 nautical miles off the state’s coastline that would eventually produce as much as 500 megawatts of power for the state.

Researchers at UMBC were called in to enhance understanding of the role mid-Atlantic weather patterns have on seasonal and temporal wind resource variability off the coast of Maryland, which will ultimately lead to better estimation and optimal development strategies for offshore wind energy production. The first stage of development for Maryland’s wind energy area will be a 200-megawatt wind farm, with potential construction of at least 40 wind turbines initially, with the potential for more than 300 once fully developed.

Knowing the wind variability over a large wind farm is just the latest use for the scanning Doppler Wind LIDAR at UMBC, a technology like radar but one that uses laser light instead of sound waves. LIDAR can make exquisite 3-D images by bouncing off things as small as air particles.

LIDAR is a technology that has become very popular with scientists doing precise long-distance imaging. One team at The College of William & Mary, for instance, has used LIDAR to make a model of where ground water would go if another huge hurricane hit Manhattan; researchers at Carnegie Mellon University used it to plot illegal gold mines in Peru. UMBC scientists have had years of experience with LIDAR in the atmosphere. UMBC’s Atmospheric LIDAR Group measures air quality across the U.S. and runs a much-followed environmental website called the U.S. Air Quality Weblog, aka the “Smog Blog.”

The UMBC team used Doppler Wind LIDAR last summer to see how much wind is available off of Ocean City for the wind farm.

Powering Up

Wind energy is booming all over the United States. But it has yet to come to full strength in Maryland.

Although it remains behind Europe in wind energy (which accounts for 13 percent of that continent’s energy) the United States now gets almost 4 percent of its electricity from wind turbines – enough to power 15 million homes.

The U.S. Department of Energy projects that this figure will rise to 20 percent by the year 2030. States in the Midwest, which have the advantage of wind constantly raking the prairie, already generate substantial amounts of electricity from turbines. Two states, South Dakota and Iowa, generate more than 25 percent of their electricity from the wind. Six states get more than 15 percent; nine get better than 10 percent.

Another key to the rise of wind energy is that the price of wind-generated electricity has fallen 43 percent in the last four years, according to the AWEA U.S. Wind Industry Annual Market Report Year Ending 2013. More than 61,000 turbines have already been built – a boom spurred by the federal Production Tax Credit Act, which gives 2.3 cents of tax relief per kilowatt hour for the first 10 years of a turbine’s life.

Maryland ranks only 32nd in the nation in wind-generated electricity. At present, Maryland gets only 0.9 percent of its electricity from the wind, some 120 megawatts, or enough to power 29,000 homes. The state has 51 turbines in four working projects. The Maryland Renewable Portfolio Standard requires the state get 20 percent of its energy from renewable resources like wind by 2022.

Energy efficiency is only one of the tangible benefits that ramping up the state’s wind-power infrastructure will bring. The Department of Energy estimates that a large facility (200 megawatts) would reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, by more than 378,000 tons per year. Such a plant would be “green” in other ways, creating almost 850 manufacturing and construction jobs over five years and 160 permanent jobs to keep it running, Maryland’s Department of Business & Economic Development projects that would generate $1.3 billion over five years, including $5.6 million in taxes.

Andrew Gohn, senior clean energy program manager at the Maryland Energy Administration (MEA), says when he took his job five years ago Maryland produced no wind energy. It wasn’t clear, he says, that Maryland had the winds that would make wind energy viable.

“Our understanding of the wind evolved,” Gohn says.

Part of that understanding is the role that offshore winds will play for coastal states like Maryland. Offshore wind energy is common in Europe. Europe now gets 8 percent of its electricity from offshore wind farms, with countries like Denmark, Britain and the Netherlands leading the way. By 2020, according to the European Wind Energy Association, a quarter of European power will be generated by offshore turbines. There are no offshore facilities yet in the United States, although 18 are planned, including the Maryland project.

UMBC and its LIDAR lab are key players in charting a course for offshore wind power. Ruben Delgado, a native of Puerto Rico and an assistant research scientist at UMBC’s Joint Center for Earth Systems Technology (JCET), headed the university’s field team. Delgado has used LIDAR technology to measure particles in the upper atmosphere in other experiments, so he had considerable experience using laser remote sensing. His team now had the task of discovering whether there was enough wind offshore to make a Maryland wind farm economically viable.

“We are using lasers to measure the speed of aerosol particles and dust particles [in the air], and from there we can infer the wind velocity, speed and direction, and derive atmospheric parameters such as turbulence and wind shear,” says Delgado.

Navigating the Questions

Delgado and a team of UMBC undergraduate students were embedded with employees of the St. Petersburg, Fla., firm Coastal Planning & Engineering Inc. on a chartered boat (the Scarlett Isabella) off the Maryland coast last summer. The ship sailed a grid pattern – similar to what ships do in rescue searches – to conduct the research, which took place near the coast of Ocean City. The team explored 94-square nautical miles, ranging from 10 nautical miles from Ocean City to as far away as 30.

The voyages lasted over a two-month period, with researchers out on the water in two-week shifts. The time spent on the boat was by no means exciting, but the data the scientists and other researchers gathered was important. Besides the UMBC LIDAR, the ship carried seismic and magnetic detection gear to survey the seabed, which researchers were measuring to see whether it would support wind turbine construction.

Alexandra St. Pé ’13, M.S. geography and environmental systems, is a current Ph.D. student in the department involved with the project. She adds that the researchers didn’t just mind and monitor the computers for the research. They also had to keep an eye out with binoculars for marine wildlife like whales, dolphins, and turtles. Under federal law, the ship – or any vessel – is forbidden from going within 500 meters (around 1,500 feet) from certain protected species. The presence of dolphins also required researchers to turn down the sonar used for exploring to protect the mammals. Lookouts also watched for seabirds and bats.

At one time or another, the researchers spotted all the above along with some sharks and tuna. They had to cease operations six times during the summer because of the presence of marine animals.

Delgado and his team did glean a lot of useful information from their research last summer. “Yes, there is enough wind. There was more than was anticipated,” Delgado says. “The models do a decent job of representing how much wind is out there, but it is not the same as measuring it [with LIDAR]. Measuring the winds offshore last summer and the measurement we are doing now allows us to actually measure the variation of that wind and see how that translates into power.”

For energy purposes wind must be measured the first 250 meters above the surface, where Delgado aimed the LIDAR.

One of the surprises, observes St. Pé, was the strong summertime wind resource offshore. The researchers expected to find, for instance, less wind offshore during the summer due to quiescent, hot weather patterns typical for the region. Low wind speeds during the summer would be a concern due to peak electricity demand from air conditioners running in the Maryland heat.

But that is not what the scientists found. “We see [data] that shows there is more wind than expected in the summer,” says Delgado. “Which is a good thing. The forecasting models indicate that for wind energy to be profitable the average annual wind speed should be approximately 7 meters per second. The summer weather patterns is known to be one of greater energy consumption and low wind speeds. Our measurements indicated that wind speeds greater than 7 meters per second are frequent and can be as high as 14.”

It was important to get the wind speed right because the power that can be harnessed by wind turbines is a function of the cube of the average wind speed. Wind turbines collect 20 to 40 percent of the energy in the wind. Changes in wind velocity help make them more efficient, meaning if the wind doubles in speed, the energy output goes up eight times.

Answering Doubts

Wind power seems to be a perfect solution to help boost clean energy in Maryland. But there are uncertainties. Conservationists worry about the impact wind farms would have on the marine life that the researchers so closely monitored.

Others complain that turbines are an eyesore and make too much noise. The planned offshore facility would be over the horizon – out of sight and out of hearing. But there has been legislative pushback on the proximity of some land-based wind projects to the Patuxent River Naval Air Base in southern Maryland. Skeptics about that project, including U.S. Representative and House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (Md., 5th District), think the turbines would interfere with radar testing at Patuxent and force the base to close. Such concerns don’t affect the offshore Ocean City project, but they do demonstrate the complexity involved with winning public support of what might seem a simple technology.

But for a long time it was economics, not aesthetics or wildlife concerns, that helped block wind power as a viable option. Coal and gas remained cheaper.

Not anymore. In some places, wind energy now costs about the same as natural gas, thanks to innovations like new kinds of turbines and blades. In Australia, it’s cheaper than both coal and natural gas, and it’s competitive to coal in India.

Since the 1990s, the size of rotors has increased by 90 percent and the hubs of the rotors are now 45 percent higher, some as high as 100 meters (330 feet). They generate 17 times more power than those used 20 years ago. In some areas of the United States – west Texas, for instance – the price of wind energy is down to less than two cents a kilowatt hour. In some places, according to Gohn of the MEA, which is in charge of the project, wind energy has reached “grid parity.” In the mid-Atlantic states it is around 6-1/2 to 8-1/2 cents, close to being competitive.

Wind farms, unlike coal or natural gas-generating facilities, are capital-intensive—the greatest cost is in constructing the wind farm, something like 75 percent of the total cost. Since it does not depend on a commodity to run it – coal or gas – and gets its power for free, a wind farm is cheap to operate. The “fuel” to run it also is stable, which energy companies like.

St. Pé, who is assisting Delgado, says there is room for two leases – perhaps for two different developers – in the offshore area that UMBC researchers canvassed. Those farms could eventually produce 400 to 800 megawatts apiece, creating a total of 800 to 1,600 megawatts.

Two hundred megawatts would power a third to a half of the needs of the Eastern Shore. And local power companies are legally obliged to buy the output. The developers would run the farm and sell their energy to power companies, which are obliged to buy it and balance it with the energy produced by the fossil-fuel generators in the grid, which has limited capacity.

Delgado says that UMBC will be back at Ocean City again this year. This time they’ll be deploying a scanning Doppler Wind LIDAR instrument at Ocean City. He says that the data they obtain will provide even more evidence to help build Maryland’s wind power future.

“Wind is starting to boom in Maryland,” Delgado says. “The effect the high wind speed has off the coast of Maryland makes it a viable source of energy. It has enormous potential offshore.”

— Joel N. Shurkin
Illustrations by Joanna Barnum

Read the full issue of the Summer 2014 UMBC Magazine.