Networking at Sea
By Karly Brownfield, Senior Program Manager
In August, the Southeastern Wind Coalition and Conservative Energy Network hosted a series of educational tours across Virginia and North Carolina. The tours brought together policymakers, partners, and industry leaders from across the Southeast, including our Louisiana team, who joined to explore opportunities for their state. The itinerary included boat tours of an offshore wind farm and a port tour, plus a land tour of a wind farm. This is the first in a three-part series on what we saw, heard, and learned along the way.
There's a lot to say about what these tours covered technically. But what stuck with our team the most wasn't a slide deck or a statistic, it was the conversations that happened along the way. Here's why in-person engagement on the water turned out to be one of the most valuable parts of the trip.
What a Fact Sheet Can’t Do
You can send someone a fact sheet. You can walk them through a slide deck with turbine specs and megawatt projections. But you can't replicate the experience of standing on a boat deck, watching the waves, and talking with a boat full of people for hours. In-person engagement has the ability to slow things down just enough for real conversations to happen.
One of the most valuable parts of these tours was the people. With 60 people onboard from a variety of states and backgrounds, there were so many opportunities for real conversations that helped partners and policymakers grasp the scale of these installations, understand the real-world logistics, and appreciate the massive workforce demands required to support them.
What Surprised People Most
That in-person quality shows up in small moments, too.
The first reaction people had was almost always about scale and how long it took to actually reach the turbines before we could see them. What also caught people off guard was the quiet. "Wow, it's so quiet," was something we heard more than once. Someone else joked, "This could put me to sleep." Then, every so often, a blade would cross in front of the monopile and you'd hear a subtle "whoosh.”
It's a small thing, but it's the kind of small thing that sticks with people long after the tour ends. When you can see and hear something in action, it stops being a concept and starts being real.
Behind the Scenes: Ports and Logistics
The tours weren't just about the turbines themselves and what was happening more than 27 miles out at sea. The port tour included meaningful conversation focused on upgrades to a port, staging components, and the overall investments this brings to an area. For attendees, being able to connect the dots between offshore wind development and land-based, local economic activity including port jobs, local contracts, and infrastructure made the case in a way no slide deck presentation could. You could see it, right there in the harbor.
Coming Up…
The boat tours were only half the trip. Next up: our tour of a land based wind farm plus more from our Louisiana team and their visit to Virginia.
Whether you're standing on a dock, a boat deck, or beneath a turbine in a soy field, one thing holds true: the relationships and understanding built in person are hard to replicate any other way. Stay tuned!
