MAE Professor Leads Rutgers Team Awarded $500k from US DOE Multi-university Investment in Marine Renewable Energy 

The US Department of Energy (DOE) has recently granted more than $18 million to 17 universities for projects advancing marine energy that support marine and ocean renewable energy innovation. 

A cross-disciplinary team led by Onur Bilgen, an associate professor in the School of Engineering Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, has been granted a $500,000 award to develop a fully automated, digitized, and remotely controllable water and wind energy test (W2ET) lab .  

The lab will test various waterpower and wind energy devices in order to provide publicly available marine energy data that could help identify cost reductions and performance improvements for marine energy technologies. 

This spring, Bilgen’s team which includes School of Engineering colleagues  Assistant Professor Aziz Ezzat (Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering and Assistant Professor Roger Wang (Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering), as well as Josh Kohut, co-founder of Rutgers’ Center for Ocean Observing Leadership (RUCOOL) and a professor the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences (SEBS) Department of Marine and Coastal Sciences, will begin work on their three-year project. 

Building on a Critical Rutgers-Funded Project 

This is a continuation of the $1.1 million internally funded Net-Zero Wind Energy Test WET Center Project, which was awarded by the Rutgers-New Brunswick Chancellor Francine Conway to support research in wind energy in 2023.  

The Rutgers-funded WET, according to Bilgen, supported a vision to ensure global recognition for the Rutgers multidisciplinary approach to developing, testing, and engineering offshore wind energy – and make New Jersey a global leader in the field. 

He explains, “We took that work and sought federal support. It’s very encouraging to have received the support from Rutgers that enabled us to do so many things – including hosting the 2024 North American Wind Energy Academy (NAWEA) Conference and having the critical seed data that enabled us to receive this new award from the DOE.” 

Bilgen is excited by the DOE-funded project’s combination of offshore wind with hydrokinetic energy. “These are the two most critical renewable energy sources for coastal areas – including the east coast,” he says. “As energy demand increases, we need to enhance our approach to extracting energy from various renewable sources. For New Jersey, New York, and Delaware, offshore wind and hydrokinetic energy show great potential.”