EU launches call to establish offshore renewable energies working group

The European Commission has opened a call for expressions of interest for a new working group on offshore renewable energies that would contribute to reaching EU’s ambition of at least 300GW of offshore wind and 40GW of ocean energies by 2050.

A call for expression of interest is open to all relevant stakeholder organisations to become a member of a new working group on offshore renewable energy under the framework of the clean energy industrial forum.

In concrete terms, the working group will identify and define the challenges which the sector faces and potential implementation bottlenecks for reaching the 2030 and 2050 goals – and develop recommendations for overcoming these.

The initiative follows last year’s Commission Strategy for Offshore Renewable Energy, released in November 2020.

The mandate of the group will be to help contribute to reaching the EU’s offshore renewable energy ambitions of an installed capacity of at least 60GW offshore wind and at least 1GW of ocean energy by 2030, with a view to achieving capacity of at least 300GW and 40GW respectively by 2050.

Amongst others, the recommendations of the working group are likely to focus on the critical value chain, the different supply chain segments, and associated investments – all of which need to be scaled up in order to ensure that EU renewables deployment targets can be met in a sustainable way.

The members of the working group will be decided in the first half of September with the first meeting likely to take place in mid-October, the Commission informed.

The deadline for applications is 10 September 2021.