RiCORE project to speed up consenting process for marine renewables

The project, scheduled to last for 18 months, aims to tackle one of the key issues for the deployment of offshore energy: consenting and environmental impacts.

The RiCORE (Risk Based Consenting for Offshore Renewable Energy Projects) project has been awarded EUR 1.4 million from the European Commission, through Horizon 2020 programme, and comprises teams from Ireland, Spain, Portugal, France and Scotland.

A team of European experts, led by Robert Gordon University (RGU), will be working to find a method to accelerate and streamline the environmental requirements associated with consents for offshore wind, wave and tidal projects.

The survey costs concerning environmental impact assessments and data collecting are often too expensive and time consuming which presents a problem to low risk or time-limited deployments.

Teresa Simas from WavEC in Portugal said: “For many large projects there will always be a need to collect a lot of data. However, we think we can speed the process up for smaller schemes in marine zones that are less vulnerable. The key is to be able to identify schemes that are relatively low risk.”

Ian Davies from Marine Scotland stated: “The aim is to develop risk profiles based on a number of environmental and technical factors such as the scale of the project, the type of device, whether or not it is an existing technology – and the environmental sensitivity of the marine environment. Developments with low risk profiles can potentially be fast tracked.”

Furthermore, RiCORE is looking to standardize environmental monitoring for the deployed projects.

Anne Marie O’Hagan from Beaufort in University College Cork, Ireland commented: “There is currently a wide variety of methodologies and survey techniques employed to monitor the impact of marine renewable projects across Europe, and it is difficult to compare environmental data collected at different sites. We need to work towards standardising data collection to help policymakers understand the environmental effects of different devices, and the RiCORE project is an important step towards that goal.”

RGU is leading RiCORE on behalf of the Offshore Renewables Institute, collaboration between RGU and the Universities of Dundee and Aberdeen.

RiCORE project will run between January 1, 2015 and June 30, 2016.

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Image: WavEC