The COVID-19 crisis has galvanised the fight against climate change, and promoted initiatives to accelerate the European Green Deal
Offshore renewable energy sources, including offshore wind, wave and tidal current power, will play a crucial role in the energy transition, making it possible to have a low-carbon energy system and boosting economic growth and job creation.
Achieving continuous cost reduction for more efficient and competitive technologies is one of the challenges facing renewable energies. Design tools help to accelerate cost reduction in the early stages of technological development or in project planning.
A recent article published by a number of experts in our field of offshore renewable energy technologies provides examples of these design tools, which cover different stages of technological or project development: multi-physical numerical modelling for designing floating wind turbines; decision-making during the planning phase of offshore renewable wind farms; and structured innovation and phased validation for assessing innovations that can be applied to offshore renewables in the early stages of development.
European initiatives
A number of European initiatives have allowed our researchers to develop and/or validate these tools. DTOcean and DTOceanPlus are advanced design tools for innovating, developing and implementing ocean energy systems.
LIFE50+ develops competitive floating substructure solutions for 10 MW wind turbines at depths of more than 50 m. OPERA compiles, analyses and shares data and offshore operational experiences to validate and eliminate risks from various industrial innovations for the wave power sector.
This article contains references to open source tools and public documents produced by these projects.
Further information
