Marine Spatial Planning of a Wave-Powered Offshore Aquaculture Farm in the Northeast U.S

Wind energy, offshore aquaculture, and wave energy developers are entering an already crowded space in the ocean, with various groups vying for its bounty. Constructive engagement between new developers, coastal communities, and fisheries will become increasingly necessary in order to minimize conflict and increase production. Marine spatial planning (MSP) is a technique used to make informed decisions about the sustainable use of marine resources. Offshore developers have begun to use MSP in order to achieve these goals of minimized conflicts, increased production, and greater sustainability. In this paper, an open-source MSP tool is developed to plan a favorable deployment location for a wave-powered aquaculture farm (WPAF) growing Atlantic salmon in the Northeast U.S. The MSP tool finds an optimal deployment location for the WPAF, while avoiding conflicts with existing or planned offshore activities, including recreational and commercial fisheries, military zones, offshore wind farms, shipping lanes, and marine protected areas. The planning objective is to find a deployment location where the total cost of weekly vessel travel to a WPAF and the cost of the wave energy converters (WECs) used to power the farm is minimized. In addition, this deployment location must meet the environmental needs of fish, have the required wave environment for sufficient wave energy production to supply the aquaculture farm, and avoid conflicts with the aforementioned industries. To solve this MSP optimization problem, we use a brute-force searching method through a coarse grid in the Northeast U.S. to find the optimal deployment location. The MSP tool is tested for multiple sizes of an Atlantic salmon offshore aquaculture farm: small (5 net pens), medium (12 net pens), and large (40 net pens), and the power needs of the farm are supplied by a two-body point-absorber WEC (the Department of Energy Reference Model 3). The optimal deployment location is found to be the same for all sized farms at 44.1°N and 67.9°W, about 35km off the Coast of Acadia National Park, since this location has the highest wave power density and hence minimizes the number of WECs needed to power each farm.