Achievement

Our IGERT course “Wind Energy: Environmental Assessment, Monitoring & Regulatory Requirements” taught in the Spring 2013 used case study approach and focused on a potential offshore wind development site in Puerto Rico. As part of the course, IGERT students and course instructors (Griffin & Danylchuk) conducted a site visit to learn first hand about the nature of the marine and terrestrial environments. During the trip, students also met with stakeholders, non-government and government agencies to develop a better understanding of how the environmental assessment and monitoring cannot be decoupled from public policy and engineering aspects of offshore wind energy. During classroom sessions at UMass, students compared the environmental assessment and monitoring challenges related to local offshore wind developments (e.g., Cape Wind) with the case study in Puerto Rico. This integrative, experiential, and comparative approach proved especially effective as a teaching format.