EC: De-risking consenting for ocean energy up for discussion

Officials from the European Commission’s Environment department will present the EU regulatory framework applicable to ocean energy projects at the roundtable on environmental legislation and consenting procedures for ocean energy in Brussels next month.

The Ocean Energy Forum’s draft strategic roadmap for the ocean energy sector identified de-risking environmental consenting as one of the key challenges for the sector.

Correctly implementing environmental legislation and having coherent consenting/licensing procedures in place are important for obtaining a social license to operate, also for ocean energy projects, EC states.

However, consenting risk for ocean energy projects is still considered to be high. Several issues have been raised in the context of the Ocean Energy Forum, including:

• questions regarding the difficulty of fitting new activities (such as ocean energy) into existing frameworks,
• questions regarding the proportionality of costs of environmental assessment and monitoring for small pilot projects,
• questions about processing and sharing of the knowledge and data gathered through environmental assessments and monitoring.

At this roundtable, set to take place at Berlaymont building, Brussels, on February 19, 2016, the officials from EC’s Environment department will interact with consenting authorities and industry to discuss these and other issues.

The roundtable is expected to help the Ocean Energy Forum develop proposals to tackle the challenge of de-risking consenting procedures.

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