The U.S. offshore wind industry’s efforts to meet demand from East Coast states trying to decarbonize their grids by 2050, and now the Biden administration’s goal to get 30,000 MW of generation in the water by 2030, puts new pressure on it to include minority/women-owned business enterprises (MWBEs) in their immense supply chains.

Presentations at a virtual program held by the Business Network for Offshore Wind on Thursday included a well attended session showing that the equity issue is already embedded in the OSW industry’s practices.

Jessica Dealy, external affairs lead at Atlantic Shores Offshore Wind — a joint venture between EDF Renewables and Shell New Energy, and one of two project bidders before the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities — said the company is aware that bidding “can be quite intimidating to new and smaller companies.”

She said Atlantic Shores has taken a very deliberate recruitment strategy to focus on finding MWBEs well before it seeks suppliers.

“We’re in fact building an internal tracking system ahead of our project implementation phase, which is when we do the bulk of our contracting with the supply chain, and we want to do that to help ensure that we engage with MWBEs to the maximum extent possible,” she said.

“We look for organizations that can actually help the market and build these companies up. If you just give one small company a chance to break into this industry, chances are they’re going to flourish,” she added, noting that Karp Strategies — a leading women-owned New York urban planning firm whose CEO, Rebecca Karp, was also a panelist in the program — is one such company.

“When we approached them two years ago to help us with stakeholder engagement, they were not in the offshore space. They knew very little about it, but they quickly jumped on the boat, if you will, and now they have an entire offshore division within their company and have been a huge asset to our team,” Dealy said.

“Local businesses create local content. So that helps incentivize developers to try to find resources within a state and support smaller businesses and contract them and bring them into the fold. It just makes good sense to us [to] develop our projects to involve communities [and] local business.”

Panelists Teaera Strum, COO of Baltimore-based Strum Contracting Co., a specialty welding company, and Mark Rice, owner of Maritime Applied Physics Corp., an engineering and maritime manufacturing company, also based in Baltimore, told the audience how their previous relationships in Baltimore manufacturing networks allowed them to marshal their knowledge and experience and break into offshore contracting.

After traveling to Denmark and Germany in a tour sponsored by the Business Network for Offshore Wind to learn about OSW projects, Rice said he could see how much of a “workforce challenge” projects in the U.S. would be. “We were able to talk to developers and manufacturers and really got an overview of what was required to enter the [offshore] business,” he said. The firm began winning contracts once back home.

Rice and Strum knew one another because they had served on business network boards in Baltimore and had become friends. They decided to partner in order to compete for some contracts.

“We are not an MWBE company, and teaming with Teaera has let us compete for contracts as a subcontractor to Tierra. It’s been a two-way street. We’re able to include Teaera in contracts we do for the Navy,” Rice said.

Strum said the relationship has helped her company grow. “I will say that because of the Business Network for Offshore Wind, a very small firm like Strum Contracting now has the ability and the trust to work with someone like Mark Rice. This industry has truly transformed Strum Contracting. We have been able to grow substantially.”