Welcome to the Supergen ORE Landscape

The lack of a standardised and validated approach to marine planning for ORE developments is holding back the development of the ORE sector and establishing such an approach is necessary to allow policymakers and investors to make informed decisions on the funding of the ORE sector.

Fit-for-purpose market mechanisms are needed for the UK domestic ORE market, with appropriate measures reflecting requirements for technology sectors at different stages of development, particularly for marine renewable energy. Development and analysis of potential policy frameworks to support ORE technology commercialisation will allow rational mechanisms to be established.

ORE operates in the marine environment alongside other users and there is potentially a conflict for resource, marine space and infrastructure. Better understanding of the requirements, and of complementary and competing users will be necessary for rational spatial planning.

The Supergen ORE Hub leadership role includes connecting those active in the sector and communicating ORE issues to a range of user groups, including politicians and public, education and to improve understanding via use of public engagement. Better public understanding of ORE and whole-systems approaches, ocean literacy and ecological interactions, will impact on public perception and the granting of Social License.

The prediction of cumulative and interaction of multiple effects is needed in order to understand the long term impact of ORE developments on the marine environment and to inform marine planning. It will allow better future prediction or range of environmental impacts from physical changes up through food chain, including far-field and cumulative effects, and their impact on ecological limits and ecological carrying capacity, and put into context of climate change. Improved ecosystem modelling tools will enable environmental change prediction to be expressed as different ???currencies??? (i.e. Carbon, economic via natural capital/ecosystem services, social capital).

ORE projects may be prevented or held back by the lack of confidence of their effect on the marine environment. The current models do not predict the impact on individuals and on population levels with good certainty and so development of these models and the data collection and analysis methods behind them would enable more confident prediction of the impact on marine animals and birds.

This would enable the impact of ORE projects to be better understood and potentially lead to cost reduction in environmental monitoring and faster project consenting.

Environmental monitoring is a high cost aspect of ORE project development and is needed during both environmental impact assessment and post consent. However, there is generally low confidence in the predictions of cumulative and population level environmental impacts. Better understanding of the models and the data needed for use in them will enable the development of a framework for monitoring data collection with environmental impact assessment and post consent guidelines.

In order to reduce the risk to human life in servicing O&M requirements of ORE structures, redundant systems to reduce time off for maintenance and human intervention may be considered. This may be achieved through increasing system reliabilities by increasing component redundancies, however this is a design trade-off with cost. Evaluating and specifying the ideal trade-off point between system reliability and lifecycle cost is needed, as well as better understanding of O&M uncertainties and the adoption of risk-based approaches to minimise risk in ORE O&M.

ORE farms are critical assets that provide an Increasing amount of data and heightened sensitivity that require consideration of cybersecurity. Cybersecurity is an established area, but requires implementation for ORE.

Opportunity for the UK to lead the development on data and cyber security protocols for ORE usage.

Remote sensing and the use of autonomous vessels and robotics for inspection of ORE machines, e.g. turbine and structure, and for environmental monitoring is expected to become increasingly commonplace. There are technical challenges in developing systems and there is also the need to develop clear regulation and legislation for UAV operations within offshore assets.

To minimise offshore operations and inform O&M strategies, remote sensing and remote condition monitoring through digital twin technology are important developments that have the potential to enable remote resets and repairs and significantly reduce the cost of O&M offshore. Improved analysis tools and treatment of big data generated by remote sensing, proven by smarter benchmarking will be needed to unlock the potential for use of AI and machine learning and present opportunities for advanced asset monitoring and management, potentially lowering OPEX cost, whilst increasing availabilities.

Targets are moving towards being defined in terms of energy - also very large scale envisaged (50MV) A systems level approach to supply, storage and grid integration is needed for optimal utilisation of offshore assets. The Government are starting to set energy targets and reducing the economic viability opens the potential for device deployment in UK, South America etc. The limit of Economic Viability of Devices should be investigated to enable design to lower (for instance) the velocity of flow whilst achieving economic viability.

Efficient numerical models need to developed for array optimisation or ORE systems, which include: optimal control; understanding device conditions; hydrodynamic interaction; uncertainty quantification, yield optimisation; blocking and efficient arrays in real channels; mooring or power take off sharing. Better understanding of the hydrodynamics of array interaction, layout performance and design, including moorings and anchors is needed through physical wave tank tests and numerical modelling.

Develop new component technologies, system design concepts and processes, that unlock whole life design improvements that extend into recycling, reuse, repair, decommissioning and/or repower.

Develop new component solutions with innovative, materials, designs, operating principles to plug gaps in system reliability and to extend or expand device performance.

Establish and extend operational limits or performance by better identifying and mitigating extreme loads and aggregated actions vs. operation behaviour at system and component level. Including interaction between environment and system control parameters and to extend operational limits of devices extending turbine size limits and fatigue life, understanding localised environment conditions to inform aggregated effects (e.g. on fatigue); modelling/prediction of extreme environmental loads.

Establish risk-based and/or probabilistic design approaches that span resource, device, control strategy and array. Develop rational, coupled whole-life models for resource - device/structure (and control) - foundation interaction to allow consistent target reliability. Unpack existing practices inherited from oil and gas, to remove conservatism, and counter current issues of low survivability of some trial systems

Power electronics conversion is important for all types of ORE technology and the power electronics needs to have better reliability and improved control systems in order to enhance performance and grid integration. The impact of improved power electronic control reliability will be to reduce operating costs and improve utilisation of ORE.

Conception, design and validation of novel drive trains for ORE devices including hydraulic drives, direct drive generators and devices to couple multiple prime movers into single generators. Designs should aim to provide a large dynamic range, with increased lifetime and reduced CAPEX and OPEX.

Smart sensors may be embedded within structures and ORE machines, or may be developed as part of autonomous monitoring systems. In order to develop sensors fit for purpose in the offshore ORE environment, there is a need to identify, evaluate and validate sensor technology, data transmission, integration and interpretation systems to support control and planning of operations and maintenance. This includes both sensing applied to individual ORE devices, arrays of devices and the environments in which they operate.

There are research challenges in the development of control technologies in order to optimise the performance of ORE systems under varying operating and survivability conditions, both for individual devices and for arrays. There is a need to develop and validate control technology to control the individual ORE device and the whole ORE farm to maximize the power capture, reduce the fatigue load and minimize the environment impact.

A large number of first-generation wind turbines are entering the second half of their service life. Service life extension and repowering can reduce LCoE, however materials used in decommissioned blades in particular need to be reused/recycled. New research is needed to investigate methods to repurpose and/or recycle composites for offshore wind and marine renewables.

The development of innovative materials and their application for the ORE sector will enable improvements in structural integrity, corrosion resistance and fatigue life.

Marine renewables and deep water offshore wind turbines require reduction of installation costs through innovative methods while maintaining safety levels.

Morphological change in tidal races, tidal estuaries and the open ocean is not well understood, hampering exploitation resources. If the changes to water flow, sediment and habitat can be predicted, confidence in design and social acceptability will be raised.

For ORE structures to be economically viable, economies of scale need to be realised. The design of next generation structural systems needs to transition from one-off laboratory scale models to volume fabrication to support wind/marine deployments in deep waters.

Offshore wind components/assets need to withstand the harsh marine environment hence understanding of degradation mechanisms should warrant operability and safety of personnel.

Better understanding is needed of the cable mechanics, hydrodynamics, fluid-structure interaction and interaction with a moveable sea bed, thermal and electrical effects; revisit fundamentals of exposure and support to unlock more cost-effective designs.

Multi-use platforms may be platforms supporting both wave and offshore wind, offshore wind and tidal stream devices or integration of wave energy devices within sea walls and defences. Also includes the sharing of sea space and infrastructure with oil and gas structures or aquaculture.

New concepts and materials for moorings; design of coupled mooring and foundation systems and coupling mooring analysis and hydrodynamics for floating offshore wind and wave devices. Mooring systems for arrays including shared moorings and systems with multiple devices per foundation

Design tools are used to predict how structures interact with the sea and the seabed, to test and improve designs. The current generation of simulation tools generally focus on one aspect of aerodynamics, hydrodynamics, structural dynamics or geotechnics, with simplified exchanges of data between them, meaning conservative simplifications must be made. Improving and coupling existing models will lead to better designs.

Reducing the economic viability opens the potential for device deployment in UK; South America etc.

Improved modelling tools are needed for wave, wind and tidal power resource and extreme loading assessment and for farm planning and project design. Models are also needed that include multi-scale farm-resource interaction and allow the effect of the environment on the ORE structures to be modelled as well as the effect of the ORE farm on the environment.

Measurement of MetOcean data, i.e. wind, wave and current data, including velocity, wave elevation, turbulence data, is necessary to understand the offshore energy resource. Techniques are needed to measure all forms of physical environment data and to take into account the influence of land, accessibility, the need to extrapolate to extreme events, resource variations in time and space, bathymetry and other factors. This data is an essential part of resource assessment, farm planning and prediction of performance.

Laboratory facilities are increasing the realism of their simulations. New techniques allow complex aspects of the ocean environment to be modelled in the lab, such as combined wave and current characteristics, turbulence parameters, and combinations of wind, wave and current.