Developing Offshore Wind Energy: The Challenges of Coastal and Marine Spatial Planning (2012)

Undergraduate: Lillian Steponaitis

Faculty Advisor: Sara Smith
Department: Geography

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Sustainable marine development is constrained both by the difficulty of fully understanding ocean features and resources and an historically complicated politics of use. Along a spectrum of potential management approaches, two states, Rhode Island and Massachusetts, have chosen to employ centralized, marine spatial planning. I have conducted a comparison of how Massachusetts and Rhode Island site offshore renewable energy facilities, specifically wind farms. I find significant differences between the marine spatial planning processes of Massachusetts and Rhode Island in Rhode Island Sound. I discuss the reasons for these differences and their implications, including the possibility of increased transactions costs in siting renewable energy in the future. I will use these findings to evaluate Coastal and Marine Spatial Planing efforts at the federal level.