The Offshore Renewable Energy programme aims to develop the next generation of offshore renewable energy (ORE) technologies to enable the safe, secure, cheap and efficient provision of clean energy.
The collaborative, multidisciplinary, three-year-long projects will use environmental science, technology and engineering to tackle key challenges affecting the development of ORE systems, such as offshore wind, wave and tide facilities, and maximise their environmental and socio-economic benefits.
The projects will determine where the best energy resource is available and where would be best to implement ORE technologies, and inform the development of technology so that structures are resilient to extreme events such as typhoons and earthquakes.
Furthermore the conflict between increasing energy demand and clean energy generation is one of the most pressing challenges for developing economies. China has stepped up the installation of solar energy and onshore wind capacity; however the industrialised centres along the coast do not have significant renewable energy resources available, apart from one: Offshore wind energy.
The ORE program ambition is to develop the next generation of technologies for the safe, secure, cheap and efficient provision of clean energy; building resilience against extreme events into ORE systems.
The activities will be directly build into a ‘Research Bridge’ using the outcomes to exchanging the knowledge into the other themes, whilst using the bridge to inform the activities within this project to enable a joined-up interdisciplinary and international programme of work.
To develop a knowledge exchange strategy which incorporates a plan of co-ordinated activities and details how the research teams will work together to engage stakeholders and maximise impact through the establishment of the UK-China CORE programme
The China Sea is potentially the largest offshore energy market in the world with up to 500GW capacity (1,500 TWh/year generation potential) [1], a third of which is only be exploitable with floating installations.
The total capital market for offshore wind generation hardware in China is estimated at £18 billion for the next up to 2025 years. The Chinese government is committed to ambitious installation targets for offshore wind of 30GW by 2020. The current installation pipeline is estimated at 11GW. In addition food security is another challenge faced by the growing population.
These programme tackles this challenge by applying an inter-disciplinary approach, integrating different offshore technologies, such as renewable energy and aquaculture, in Multi-Purpose Platform (MPP) systems.
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