Abstract
1.1 Environmental Monitoring
Burbo Offshore Wind Farm is a twenty-five turbine, 90MW development located in Liverpool Bay approximately 6km from the coastline of Wirral, Crosby and Liverpool.
Centre for Marine and Coastal Studies Ltd (CMACS) was appointed by SeaScape Energy Ltd in April 2005 to develop and undertake pre and during construction environmental monitoring to meet the requirements of the Food and Environment Protection Act (FEPA) licence issued to the wind farm developer. The current version of the FEPA licence is 31864/07/0 (Appendix 1).
The Environmental Monitoring Methods have been developed in consultation with statutory and non-statutory consultees. Monitoring is being undertaken through a series of discrete surveys covering various environmental and ecological components in response to the requirements of the FEPA licence. The current version of the Methods Statement is provided here as Appendix 2. These are the v1.5 methods which were also referred to in the preconstruction report; monitoring methods for the post-construction/operational phase are currently being updated following issue by SeaScape Energy of a proposed Post-construction monitoring programme (Doc No. 283521) in July 2007.
The purpose of this report is to bring together the various technical reports which present results of the different strands of the environmental monitoring. An overview of the results is provided in an Executive Summary (Section 3) and inter-related elements of the monitoring are considered in Section 4. Detailed information is provided in the technical reports within Appendix 3.
Information reported in the project Environmental Statement (SeaScape Energy 2002) and the first year FEPA report (CMACS 2006) provide the benchmark against which change can be assessed.
1.2 Wind Farm Construction Schedule
A summary of the construction schedule is provided in Table 1. For the purposes of environmental monitoring the construction period is considered to have commenced on 21st May 2006 when a filter layer was placed to stabilise sediments in advance of hammer piling of the first monopile foundations the following month. Horizontal directional drilling works to install a conduit for power export cables under the sea wall commenced in April 2006 but these onshore works are not considered relevant to any of the offshore or intertidal monitoring. Three electricity export cables were installed in July/August 2006 and intra-array cabling continued into 2007. Dumping of rock armour around monopile foundations to protect against scour took place between September and November 2006.