Heerema Engineering Solutions 

Heerema Engineering Solutions won the 2025 Ventus Award for their development of Metis, a parallel discrete event simulation tool, to ensure clients can gain insights into project durations, costs, and risks. Metis is a parallel discrete event simulation tool, which allows Heerema to simulate complex marine operations to assess the overall duration and also where challenges and potential delays could appear. Metis has diverse uses, able to be applied for clients in the early development phase of projects to perform a constructability analysis alongside CAPEX estimations to ensure an accurate budget and planning. Additionally, the tool can be used during projects to check whether operations are progressing according to plan, and where potential issues could occur that will affect the critical path.  

Heerema Engineering Solutions (HES) serves clients globally in all key renewable markets and focuses on enabling, improving, and de-risking the construction of offshore wind farms. They offer custom engineering and consultancy services to developers, contractors, and suppliers within the offshore renewable industry, from early-phase development to offshore commissioning. HES seeks to advance the offshore wind energy industry by providing Metis as a tool to develop robust, cost-effective, and low risk offshore wind projects.    

Sea Services North America 

Sea Services North America, a co-op founded by fishermen for fishermen, were selected for its work to address long-standing safety deficiencies in the fishing industry. SSNA has created a scalable pipeline of highly trained fishermen and compliant vessels for offshore wind projects. Through rigorous training programs and vessel upgrades, SSNA has elevated safety standards for over 100 fishermen and 20 vessels across seven states to the highest international levels, benefiting OSW developers and generating over $12 million in income for fishing families 

SSNA has expanded the co-op to seven states, including Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey and Virginia, training over 100 fishermen and upgrading 20 vessels to meet international safety standards (STCW and MISW). The cooperative has fostered collaboration between two historically conflicting industries by prioritizing safety, training, and operational excellence. These efforts have significantly reduced risks for offshore wind developers, contributing to the de-risking of major projects. 

Saildrone, Inc. and RPS Tetra Tech 

Saildrone and RPS Tetra Tech have designed and executed a multi-phased National Offshore Wind Research and Development Consortium (NOWRDC) project that combines advanced uncrewed surface vehicle (USV) technology with proprietary marine mammal detection artificial intelligence to create a unique near real-time acoustic monitoring platform that can be used to detect, classify, and localize marine mammals remotely. 

This USV-based monitoring system can conduct long-endurance, coordinated, and widespread passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) where Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM) Operators monitor with the support of AI to detect and mitigate, as needed, to support a wide variety of offshore wind farm operations, including foundation installation and monitoring of vessel transit corridors, or collection of baseline data during wind farm operation.  

Each technology offers significant advantages over many of the available solutions in employment at this time. As a monitoring platform, USVs are a flexible, operationally independent, and adaptable data collection method compared to static buoy systems, requiring regular and frequent intervention and support from crewed vessels. 

Cameron Poole, GNO Inc 

Cameron serves as Energy and Innovation Manager at Greater New Orleans, Inc. (GNO). He spearheads the GNOwind Alliance to grow expertise and position the state of Louisiana as an energy leader.  Cameron has also been critical in attracting grants and other investments to the region, most recently, leading the development of the Gulf Louisiana Offshore Wind (GLOW) EDA Tech Hub Phase II submission, as well as serving on the Technology Commercialization Committee on the awarded $160 million NSF Engine’s Future Use of Energy Louisiana (FUEL) grant. Finally, Cameron leads business development and innovation efforts of the regionwide initiative H2theFuture, funded by the Economic Development Administration, building a clean hydrogen energy cluster to decarbonize the South Louisiana industrial corridor. Additionally, Cameron organized the Oceantic Offshore Wind Ready Training Series in Louisiana for regional suppliers, led the development of the Louisiana Offshore Wind Supplier DataBase, is a key lead on the Louisiana Wind Energy Week program that is now entering its 2nd year, leading a strategic partnership with venture platform Newlab to de-risk carbon management startups and land them in Louisiana, and facilitated workforce programs by supporting UNO’s Wind Scholars program and their Collegiate Wind Competition team, as well as Nunez Community College’s Wind Energy technician programs.