Environmental monitoring for marine energy – instrumentation for devices and arrays

Ocean Energy Systems-Environmental and Aquatera hosted a workshop as part of the European Wave and Tidal Energy Conference on Wednesday September 6 from 4:00 to 5:30pm CEST on “Environmental monitoring for marine energy – instrumentation for devices and arrays”.

As marine energy demonstration projects progress towards commercial arrays, the lack of information on potential environmental effects continues to slow consenting, delay deployments, and impose expensive monitoring requirements. For many interactions with marine animals and habitats, observing the potential effects of marine energy devices and systems is challenging due to the remoteness of many projects as well as deployment sites characterized by fast-moving and low visibility waters. While there are few instruments and data systems tailored specifically for observing marine energy interactions, many oceanographic instruments are fit for purpose with specialized calibrations, software, and/or integrated onto platforms that can be deployed on or near devices. Data acquisition systems are under development for measuring and controlling the power production data streams from marine energy devices, but most do not collect environmental monitoring data streams.

There are no standardized instrument or data acquisition systems in use by the many different research groups and monitoring experts across the nations implementing marine energy projects. Developing a suite of instruments and data acquisition systems that are appropriate for monitoring around marine energy devices will provide researchers and device developers tools for, respectively, acquiring data that will inform regulatory processes, and providing data to regulators to help accelerate those processes. This workshop explored the most promising gear as well as work towards recommendations for preferred sets of instruments and data systems that will support consenting decisions and post-installation monitoring programs, as well as guidance on the proper use of monitoring systems for tidal and wave installations.

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