Abstract
This report, Deliverable 3.4 Socioeconomic Study (‘A study into the potential social value offered to Europe from the development and deployment of wave and tidal energy to 2050’), gathers evidence on the direct and indirect impacts, in terms of job creation, training needs and business opportunities along the value chain, to the European society and economy of the development of wave and tidal energy technologies in Europe and their deployment globally to 2050.
This study builds upon the study into the potential economic value of these technologies previously completed in the project (i.e. Deliverable 3.3 GVA Study) and identifies specific opportunities, quantitative social benefits and high-level policy recommendations. Furthermore, the socioeconomic study has a particular focus on the potential benefits that ocean energy technologies can have on coastal communities. To this respect, results, analyses and conclusions have been based on three case studies of the European regions with strongest capabilities and opportunities in ocean energy.
The global methodology involved four main steps as summarised below:
- Based on the Gross Value Added (GVA) outputs, the socio-economic study gathered evidence on number and type of jobs along the value chain with a global perspective.
- Parallel to this global job creation study, a survey was conducted among a number of key European coastal regions to assess the capabilities and socio-economic opportunities that ocean energy development can offer in these territories.
- Three different regions were selected for the case studies. This included identification of key stakeholders in the local area, data gathering and workshop for the dissemination & validation of opportunities with stakeholders.
- Finally, results and conclusions of the case studies were used to provide a series of recommendations for other EU regions with similar characteristics and objectives to maximise the impact of ocean energy in their territories.
With regard to the first step, two main deployment scenarios were selected for the job study based on the IEA ETP Faster Innovation Case (FIC), which assume the net zero carbon emissions target would be attained globally by 2050 due to a faster rate of technology innovation. These two scenarios lead to a lower and upper bound of the job creation potential for Europe if the right policies are implemented to deploy 60 GW and 100 GW by 2050 respectively. It is worthwhile mentioning that even if the job study estimates the direct, indirect and induced jobs, the results presented will mainly highlight the potential for direct and indirect jobs creation, as induced jobs are more difficult to interpret. This also facilitates comparison with other studies that have not considered induced jobs into their projections.