Abstract
Marine renewable energy is an important component of the Scottish Government’s vision for the future and will help the government reach its ambitious decarbonisation and climate change objectives.
The EcoWatt2050 project was created to investigate how we can ensure that the benefits of future large scale renewable energy developments can be maximised, whilst minimising the environmental impacts and ensuring that various legal requirements are met. The project considered the potential impacts of both future marine renewable energy and climate change, and quantified the changes in each case.
The EcoWatt2050 consortium was brought together under MASTS, and comprises the Universities of Heriot-Watt, Edinburgh, Strathclyde, Aberdeen, Swansea and the University of the Highlands and Islands, as well as the National Oceanography Centre (Liverpool) with Marine Scotland Science as full consortium partners. This booklet summarises the EcoWatt2050 research that has enabled a comparison of climate change impacts against those predicted from the removal of energy on a range of environmental features. EcoWatt2050 has addressed extensive array configurations, comprising very large scale arrays of horizontal axis tidal turbines, and two types of wave energy converter, deployed not only in Orkney and the Pentland Firth but also in other regions of Scottish Shelf Seas.