Expert Forums for Marine Renewable Energy

In preparation for the 2024 State of the Science Report, OES-Environmental gathered experts online to engage in discussion regarding social and economic effects of marine renewable energy and collect feedback and information.

In preparation for the 2024 State of the Science Report, OES-Environmental organized an expert forum gathering subject matter experts online to collect feedback for collision risk of marine animals with tidal and river turbines. 

In preparation for the 2024 State of the Science Report, OES-Environmental gathered experts online to collect feedback and attempt to reach a consensus around the definition and mechanisms of displacement in the context of marine energy.

In this online workshop with invited experts, OES-Environmental presented in an interactive session the evidence base for habitat change effects due to marine renewable energy (MRE) deployments, and discussed the ability to retire risks of changes in habitat caused by MRE devices in consenting/permitting processes.

There is limited monitoring of animal interactions around single wave and tidal devices and even less around arrays. Currently, the only examples of array monitoring are from the limited acoustic monitoring around the five tidal turbines at the RITE project (New York, Verdant Power), and soon to be revealed monitoring around the MeyGen tidal turbines (Scotland). This forum is a preliminary discussion on monitoring around tidal arrays.

The purpose of this forum was to discuss how our experts collect, analyze and interpret data; determine the extent to which there is room to standardize data across projects for comparison purposes; and to determine where gaps in data and methods exist.

This forum introduced the teams currently involved in environmental monitoring around operational tidal turbines and arrays, as well as those that have completed monitoring surveys. It is hoped that discussions in this initial expert forum will identify areas that warrant further discussion in subsequent forum meetings.

This expert forum will focus on the population level assessment of collision risk. Discussion will focus on the frameworks available for understanding and evaluating the population consequences of collision related mortality e.g. PBR based thresholds, PVA, stochastic population modelling and how regulators in different countries make decisions. We will also hopefully explore the idea of setting threshold levels of impact and ‘apportioning’ impact between different potential sources.

This forum focused on whether lobster and fish larvae and other zooplankton may be at risk from tidal energy development, whether there is a suitable way to evaluate that risk, and how that risk may be communicated to regulators and stakeholders. The experts concluded that tidal turbines would be unlikely to pose a risk to these small size classes of marine life.

This forum focused on the following: reaching some consensus on defining interactions; discussing the scales over which these interactions occur; examining lessons learned from collisions of birds with wind turbines and exploring their applicability to collision with tidal turbines; and setting the stage for discussing the different sensory modalities and varying scales of associated behavioral actions that may govern the risk to marine animals from turbines.

The use of active acoustic instruments to measure interactions of marine animals and seabirds around marine energy devices is hampered by inherently high water flows around the energy generating devices. Experts in this field were gathered to discuss techniques and challenges in an unforgiving environment.