Gearing up for Offshore Wind: An Opportunity for Working Waterfronts | Working Waterfronts Pod

January 15, 2021

Offshore wind power is coming to the American shoreline

With the accelerated growth of offshore wind in the northeast, states are aggressively investing in upgrading their port infrastructure.  On this episode of Working Waterfronts, Ashley Bennis and an expert panel take on how the northeast ports are moving forward with this development and consider how this enormous investment can be used to develop more sustainable (green) ports and increased coordination amongst states and ports to respond to the entire OWE supply chain.  In addition to US examples, the European experience, especially within the United Kingdom, will be shared to propose strategies and opportunities to appropriately respond to offshore wind development needs while also addressing to needs of the regions’ other blue economy sectors.

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Ashley Bennis

Ashley Bennis is a Michigan native that grew up in Metro Detroit and received her Bacherlors of Art from Wayne State University. Bennis began volunteering with nonprofits in the city and became very involved in the community revitalization happening there through coordinated public outreach and education efforts. She earned her master’s degree in Urban Design and Planning with a specialty in Environmental Planning from the University of Washington in 2016. While there she worked as a Research Assistant with the Institute for Hazard Mitigation, Planning and Research, an interdisciplinary team focused on helping communities plan for hazard events. The purpose of her project was to improve visual representations of FEMA’s revised floodplain maps to help with their usefulness and effectiveness for residents in flood prone areas. In the winter of 2018, she joined Texas Sea Grant as a planning specialist with the Community Resilience Collaborative, a partnership of Texas Sea Grant and the Texas Target Communities program in Texas A&M University’s College of Architecture. Her primary responsibility is to provide technical assistance to Coastal Bend and Rio Grande Valley coastal communities in land use planning and hazard mitigation.