Abstract
The principal aim of developing this environmental R&I strategy for UK ORE, is to set out the high level environmental R&I priorities for the next five to ten years, together with measures for coordinating activity across the various funding organisations and key stakeholder interests, to ensure that the general direction of travel is towards developing a sustainable ORE industry. The strategy will make recommendations for improving communications with new funding programmes and between stakeholder groups, and for pro-actively developing a new strategic collaborative environmental R&I programme involving multiple partners, in order to support maintenance of targets for renewable electricity generation out to 2020 and beyond.
The strategy covers offshore wind (fixed and floating), wave and tidal (stream and range) energy and is focussed on drawing together all the recent and existing initiatives into a comprehensive strategy, and will illustrate how different initiatives complement one another. It is predicated on maximising the use of existing structures and processes (ie. Ocean Energy ORJIP (Offshore Renewables Joint Industry Programme), the Offshore Wind ORJIP, MEW (Marine Energy Wales), SPORRAN (Scottish Offshore Renewables Research Framework, now ScotMER – Scottish Marine Environmental Research), PRIMaRE (Peninsular Research Institute for Marine Renewable Energy) and using information sources such as outputs from recent workshops (eg. The ORE Supergen Hub workshops, Oct/Nov 2017). Recommendations for finalising and implementing the strategy are set out in the final section of this document.