When Gov. Kathy Hochul laid out her plan for accelerating the development of New York’s offshore wind industry a year ago, she promised thousands of jobs for state residents.

Today, New York’s first wind farm in the Atlantic Ocean is under construction. Crews in hard hats are assembling platforms for giant turbines and building boats that will ferry technicians onto the water to ensure the massive blades keep rotating.

But the work is not being done in New York. It is happening more than 150 miles away in Rhode Island.

Flux Marine, a trailblazing developer of all-electric outboard motors and battery systems for watercraft, today announced it raised $15.5 million in an oversubscribed Series A funding round led by Ocean Zero LLC. Flux Marine will leverage the new funding to expand manufacturing, recruit additional talent, and continue to develop its advanced technologies.

Travis Bettinson’s ocean farming epiphany came in early 2019. He was listening to an episode of the Gastropod podcast, which featured a conversation with Bren Smith, cofounder of Greenwave, a nonprofit dedicated to teaching regenerative ocean farming to fishermen around the world.

Bettinson '10, who lived in Seattle at the time, had heard a little about the kelp industry from random mentions in national news outlets over the years, but this conversation was diff erent: Smith offered a deep knowledge of ocean farming, discussing the environmental value of cultivating seaweed and how well, for instance, seaweed co-cultured with shellfish — a food source that Washington led the nation in producing.

“Man, there have got to be farmers doing this,” thought Bettinson, who was running a catering service and working as a private chef at the time. “But the problem is that Americans don’t eat kelp at enough scale that the farmers can be supported.”

The ocean has always been important to Rhode Islanders. With a new focus on the blue economy, URI is working to help the Ocean State take even better advantage of its opportunities.

Vote provides a $100 million investment in the Bay Campus that will ensure URI and Rhode Island remain leaders in the global Blue Economy.

The sound of thousands of mussels moving on conveyor belts and clanking through sorting machines almost drowned out Greg Silkes as he tried to explain how the shellfish get from the ocean, through the processing plant, to plates around North America.

The ocean has always been important to Rhode Islanders. With a new focus on the blue economy, URI is working to help the Ocean State take even better advantage of its opportunities.