Uncertainties surrounding the environmental impact of large-scale floating tidal energy arrays remains a significant regulatory challenge and thus barrier to their commercialisation. The potential for protected marine species to encounter and collide with operational turbines remains one of the highest-priority concerns which is managed through a precautionary regulatory approach. Post-installation monitoring is often required as a licensing condition, with the aim of improving knowledge of near-field interactions between wildlife and operational devices and validating collision risk model predictions submitted during the consenting process. However, collision risk is an active area of research which widely recognises the technical challenges in deploying monitoring instrumentation in high-flow environments. This results in a lack of in situ species data available to improve existing collision risk models, which are extremely sensitive to assumptions about species behaviour parameters such as avoidance or fine-scale evasive responses.
Under the FORWARD2030 project an Integrated Environmental Monitoring System (IEMS) will be delivered as one of the project’s three market uptake innovations, which aim to assist with consenting of the 2030 MW pipeline and overall enhance environmental and societal acceptance of large-scale floating tidal arrays. The IEMS will incorporate technologies to monitor fine-scale species interactions around the Orbital Marine Power O2 turbine, in order to capture meaningful data that can be used to improve collision risk estimates and inform how future iterations of the IEMS could integrate with the core design of the forthcoming O2.X.
Integrated monitoring platforms with different sensor configurations have been developed to date by various research institutions for the purpose of marine species detection in challenging, high-flow environments. However, while a number of successes and lessons learnt have been reported from these studies, existing platforms have either been designed for seabed deployment or attachment to a fixed turbine, with a scarcity of available experience in developing integrated monitoring for surface floating turbines.
For more, read the Design specification for Integrated Environmental Monitoring System.