The role of MarineCadastre.gov in offshore energy planning

Abstract

Many states along the U.S. East Coast are engaged in offshore wind energy planning through the Renewable Energy Task Force process led by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM). Participants from federal, state, and local government use the task forces as a venue to share information and minimize potential conflicts between existing ocean uses and offshore wind farm construction and operations. Task force participants often only make information available in static map form, making comparisons between data sets challenging. To address this, the North and South Carolina Renewable Energy Task Forces are collaborating with the MarineCadastre.gov team to facilitate data sharing. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and BOEM have been collaborating since 2007 on MarineCadastre.gov, an integrated marine information system that provides jurisdictional, legal, physical, ecological, and ocean use data in a common geographic information system (GIS) framework. The MarineCadastre.gov website was developed in response to a call for a marine information system to support alternative energy development on the outer continental shelf in section 388 of the Energy Policy Act of 2005. Although the website has been designed specifically to support renewable energy siting within the U.S. outer continental shelf, it is also being used for various other ocean-related efforts. The MarineCadastre.gov website has three primary focus areas: Web map viewers and decision-support tools, a spatial data registry, and technical support and regional capacity building. The North and South Carolina Wind Energy Task Forces are combining national-scale data from the website with information specific to their planning areas into simple viewers available in the Map Gallery section of the website. This approach allows users to assess and minimize potential conflicts of offshore wind energy development and operation with existing ocean uses. Multiple issues, such as fishing, shipping, and defense, are viewed and considered simultaneously, in one location, allowing members of the task force to see their own data in a wider context. This enhances the utility of the information that was previously compared using static maps. Users can turn data layers on and off and pan and zoom to specific locations in the planning area as questions arise. The North and South Carolina Wind Energy Task Force data viewers are a simple but powerful mechanism for identifying areas of potential incompatibility, enhancing communication between task force members, and increasing the overall effectiveness of the task force process. The overarching goal of this work is to support the BOEM task forces in making sound decisions with the best available spatial information to facilitate responsible siting of offshore renewable energy infrastructure. This presentation will provide an overview of the primary focus areas of the MarineCadastre.gov project and its underlying technology, with particular attention given to the collaborations with the BOEM-led renewable energy task forces in North and South Carolina. Details on how these two BOEM task forces are incorporating use of the data viewers into their decision-making processes, the types of data being considered, and potential next steps for analyzing the spatial information in a group setting will be discussed.