Marine Energy Session: United we stand for European offshore renewable energy targets

The governments and the supply chain, the technology developers and the investors, need to work together if marine energy is to find the faster way forward, and if the European targets for offshore energy are to be reached in time, was the message that echoed during the Marine Energy Session held as part of OEEC 2021.

The session featured four topics, each equally important for the successful commercialization and scale-up of marine energy technologies, that were hosted by Britta Schaffmeister, the CEO of Dutch Marine Energy Centre (DMEC), which organised the session.

Backing up the topics, big names from the industry were present as speakers including Xavier Guillou from DG Mare, Benjamin Lehner from DMEC, and contributors who joined online Rebecca Pike from RWE Renewables UK, Michael Baumann from SFK Group, Gavin McPherson from Nova Innovation, and Alexandre Chavarot from the Coalition of Climate Resilient Investment.

Setting the scene for the discussion that followed was Xavier Guillou who explained how the already set European offshore renewable energy targets – which include plans for marine energy of 100MW by 2025, 1GW by 2030, and ultimately 40GW – can contribute to the acceleration of the development of the sector.

According to Guillou, the governments should ‘challenge’ the developers as the technology itself has been in the water for quite some time now, and scaling up of the sector faster could be achieved if the governments would launch more pilot tenders.

“We are quite convinced that there are enough solutions and developers in Europe for governments to have a very solid and competitive process – even at early stage – either with specific technologies or in combination with others”, said Guillou.

The importance of combining marine energy sector was also emphasized, especially by DMEC’s Benjamin Lehner who presented a pan-European collaborative project EU-Scores which combines wave energy and floating solar with more developed industries such as bottom-fixed and floating offshore wind.