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Spools of baby kelp fronds grow in vats inside a shipping container converted into a refrigerated cultivation room at Greenwave’s offices in New Haven Connecticut.
Spools of baby kelp fronds grow in vats inside a shipping container converted into a refrigerated cultivation room at Greenwave’s offices in New Haven Connecticut.
Stacks of kelp culture sit bathed in red light in Greenwave’s office in New Haven CT on November 2, 2023.
A bright autumn sun strikes a placid Quinnipiac River over the Fair Haven Heights hillside, resplendent in yellows and red. Boats bob on the marina. The air feels comfortably brisk after an unseasonably warm October.
It’s deceptively quiet. But tucked behind the office of the Quinnipiac River Marina there’s a bustle of activity. It’s kelp planting season. Greenwave, a small sustainable seaweed nonprofit, is cultivating lines of sugar kelp to string out into the cold waters of Long Island Sound for the growing season.
“Last year we did about 3,000 feet of seed this way,” said Toby Blotch, the director of infrastructure for Greenwave. “This year we’re doing that again with about 40,000 feet of seed.”
Greenwave is trying to grow a generation of high-tech kelp farmers here in the U.S. They have a test farm in Long Island Sound and collaborators nationwide. For the past decade they’ve been building a kelp seed bank while developing kelp cultivation and processing techniques in order to build a domestic kelp industry.
Blotch heads back into a refrigerated room lit entirely by red LED panels. Kelp cultures in clear petri dishes are stacked high on shelves. Under the red lights, Greenwave can keep the kelp at a set life stage, growing “seed” indefinitely until its ready to plant, he said.
Toby Blotch, infrastructure director for Greenwave leads CT Insider into the red room where kelp seedlings are kept in permanent pause in their lifecycle. The life stage that these kelp are in will continue to replicate as long as they are “paused” at this phase of life, creating indefinite seed.
“Historically people go out into nature, find wild plants, do a spore extraction, then try to inoculate their spools with those spores,” said Blotch. “Your entire growing season is defined by when this happens, and with warming ocean waters that’s shorter growing seasons.”
Kelp has a complex life cycle. But the most familiar type that has long, thick, leaflike weeds with bulbous “roots,” is actually asexual, reproducing through spores. Reproduction is almost microscopic and mostly free floating. By pausing kelp in this tiny, free-floating phase, a farmer can keep a near limitless supply of “seed” on hand.
“They sit here in perpetuity, so year over year, we can keep a backup,” said Blotch.
Figuring out how to interrupt and domesticate kelp’s life cycle was worked out by University of Connecticut professor, and internationally recognized seaweed expert Charles Yarish, who serves on Greenwave’s board of advisors. At about the same time, Greenwave’s founder, Brent Smith, was casting around for another crop to grow when a storm wiped out his oyster beds.
“Farming the ocean is hard, there’s a lot of uncertainty. We can’t control the tides. We can’t control the weather,” said Kendall Barbery director of program development for Greenwave. She said that the whole point of the project was to develope a sustainable, adaptable industry. “Bending like a willow, not being an oak.”
Kendal Barbery of Greenwave looks at growing kelp seedlings at Greenwave’s office and lab in New Haven Connecticut.
Greenwave is just one of a growing number of blue technology companies that have emerged in the Northeast in recent years. At its most basic, blue technology is environmentally friendly, sustainable technology for the ocean. It’s “green energy,” or “green technology” for the sea, and it’s roughly where biotech was in terms of development a decade or so ago.
The MIT Technology Review ranks the United States as the fourth most competitive nation in blue technology, behind Denmark, Germany and the United Kingdom at No. 1. Locally, hubs are forming in Rhode Island and around Boston. Major universities like MIT and UConn are getting involved, contributing time and expertise.
At a recent blue technology forum at the Mystic Seaport Museum, members of dozens of blue tech companies, investors, academics, and local politicians mingled to talk amidst an art display depicting humankind’s relationship with the sea.
The group gathered at one point along the Mystic River where Jaia Robotics, a blue tech startup from Rhode Island, demonstrated their low-cost aquatic drones. Volunteers tossed the torpedo-shaped robots off the docks while a technician thumbed a rugged tablet. Instantly the robots powered up their engines and started taking depth and temperature readings, beaming their data back to shore.
An autonomous vehicle from SeaTrac sits on a trailer outside of the Mystic Seaport Museum at a conference of blue technology companies, academics and investors this past September.
Nearby on shore, a vessel that looked like a solar-panel covered surf board with a motor sat on a trailer, drawing attention from the crowd. A woman in a business suit slapped the top of an autonomous boat. “This thing survived a Pacific storm!” said Alessandra Bianchi of SeaTrac Systems, a blue tech company based in Marblehead, Mass.
Christina Brophey, the Mystic Seaport Museum senior director of curatorial affairs, said she wanted the museum to serve as a hub for the emerging blue technology community and organized the conference as a way to get people taking about new technology and their relationship with the ocean.
“It’s important that we provide that context,” Brophey said, adding that there is a long arc of human maritime history in pollution and invasive species in the Mystic River. “These are great opportunities for economic growth but also for individuals to reimagine what it means to have a maritime industry.”
Brophey said that it wasn’t just about the technology; it was also about building a sustainable relationship with the ocean. She gestured toward one of the companies that attended her conference, Thayer Mahan, a maritime remote sensing company. Thayer Mahan had started business as a defense contractor but found a niche in sustainability.
“We produce remote, autonomous systems that will define the next generation of how working in and on the ocean will influence history,” said Thayer Mahan founder Michael J. Connor, a retired vice admiral and submariner of 35 years.
Based in Groton, Thayer Mahan is focused on remote sensing and autonomous vehicle space. They mount small sonar receivers to buoys and autonomous vehicles, listening to the ocean and beaming data to satellites. Connor said that initially this was for defense purposes, filling reconnaissance roles where the U.S. Navy couldn’t afford to send a submarine. But as the company expanded, they found customers in environmental protection agencies, such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for tracking whales.
“Our fastest growing area of business is marine mammal monitoring,” said Connor. “Generally, we’re doing this for offshore wind construction.”
When their acoustic listening device detects whale song and whale clicks, Connor’s company acts to mitigate the underwater noise of offshore wind installation. The company building the massive turbines out at sea deploy bubble curtains around the offshore wind sites that muffle the piledriving sound with walls of air.
Connor said the blue technology industry is now is where drone aircraft were during the Obama administration. Miniaturization, computing power, software, communications technology and advanced materials were coming to a head, opening the sea for greater exploration, and protection. “The technology and what you can do with remote systems and artificial intelligence and autonomy, that’s all advancing,” he said. “So there’s a huge opportunity leverage a technical breakthrough.”
While many at the conference seemed optimistic for the future of blue technology in Connecticut, it was tempered by the lack of public awareness and venture capital funding for the sector. Deindustrialization and the decline of Connecticut’s working fisheries put the ocean out of many people’s minds.
“We’ve turned our backs on the ocean for so long,” Barbery from Greenwave said. “Now people from different sectors, not just people who have worked on the ocean all their lives are starting to realize how important it is.”
Barbery said many of the new kelp farmers that Greenwave supports with seed stock and technical assistance aren’t from fishing or oyster farming families, and they all face a similar problem: lack of marine infrastructure.
“There are still a lot of people on the water all the time, but most of them are recreational,” Barbery said. “One of the reasons we are so far behind is that in many places we don’t have a place to land the crop.”
