Crown Estate Scotland has committed £250,000 to support a major development project for the UK’s floating offshore wind sector.
The organisation, which manages the seabed space around Scotland, has contributed the sum to support the Environmental Interactions Strategic Programme (EISP), which is part of the Floating Offshore Wind Centre of Excellence programme run by the Offshore Renewable Energy (ORE) Catapult development body. The ESIP seeks to gather information on the environmental factors surrounding the UK’s floating offshore wind sector to ensure future floating offshore wind projects have a positive environmental impact on the seabed.
One of the ESIP’s aims is to develop and expand the body of knowledge around the seabed to make the process of conducting an environmental impact assessment more efficient. According to ORE Catapult, addressing these issues could significantly reduce costs for future offshore floating wind developments and thus encourage more and larger developments.
Floating offshore wind projects face far different challenges than fixed offshore wind projects. The impact of mooring and anchoring systems, dynamic cables, and other floating offshore wind infrastructure on the environment is not fully understood. According to ORE Catapult’s Floating Offshore Wind Environmental Interactions Roadmap, published in 2022, one of the major challenges facing the growing commercial floating offshore wind sector is the “limited understanding of environmental interactions associated with commercial-scale floating offshore wind”.
Andrew Stormonth-Darling, ORE Catapult’s principal portfolio manager for floating offshore wind, said: “The UK is already a world leader in the development of floating wind, but as we look to rapidly ramp up the commercial-scale deployment of this technology, we need to expand our understanding of how to identify, assess, and manage potential environmental interactions.”
Andy Riley, head of offshore wind for Crown Estate Scotland, agreed, noting: “Adding more knowledge and expertise to support the strategic collation of information to enable sustainable development of floating offshore wind is an ambition shared across the renewable energy sector, and we are pleased to play our part in this important programme of work.”
A recent government response to a public consultation on the Contracts for Difference (CfD) scheme saw floating offshore wind gain a major boost. The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) has stated that its phasing policy, allowing energy generation projects to be built in multiple stages, will be extended to floating offshore wind projects. Additionally, the government noted that it “anticipate[s] further rapid expansion of the FLOW sector throughout the 2030s” – a prediction supported by a recent report ranking the UK second globally for floating offshore wind projects.
