The Crown Estate has announced the awarding of the first contracts for its first major investment in environmental and technical surveys around potential new locations for floating wind farms in the Celtic Sea.
By investing in these surveys at an early stage and making the data freely available to successful bidders, the Crown Estate is aiming to accelerate the delivery of projects, making it easier for developers to take early decisions and manage risk, while supporting future project level Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) as part of the planning process.
Over the last year, the Crown Estate has been working with its technical advisors, alongside industry and other stakeholders, including statutory nature conservation bodies, to develop a programme of surveys which will deliver “strong, reliable and useful datasets” for developers.
Precise specifications will be kept under review as the programme progresses, but will cover a range of important areas, including the geophysical and geotechnical properties of the seabed, wind, wave and current patterns, and marine wildlife.
As well as providing successful bidders with easy access to vital data and speeding up the development process, it is hoped the programme will avoid the need for developers to conduct additional surveys later in the process, while making best use of limited specialist survey resource.
Contracts have now been signed for the initial phase of metocean surveys, which look at wind, wave and current patterns, to begin in Spring 2023.
The Crown Estate is progressing the procurement of the remaining surveys over the coming weeks and months, subject to further commercial discussions.
Nicola Clay, Head of New Ventures at The Crown Estate, said: “The Crown Estate is uniquely placed to facilitate this sort of collective data-gathering, which will not only help maximise the growth of secure, affordable green energy, but also support the protection and restoration of marine ecosystems.”
The Crown Estate is currently refining its broad Areas of Search into a series of smaller Project Development Areas (PDAs).
The work is ongoing, guided by engagement with stakeholders, including fishing communities and environmental groups.
In order to further accelerate the leasing process, the work to identify the final PDAs is being undertaken simultaneously with the plan-level Habitats Regulations Assessment, which assesses the potential impact of leasing plans on the most valuable environmental habitats in the UK, which make up the “UK National Network”.
The Crown Estate is ensuring that all datasets are reliable and useful with surveys focusing on the PDAs for Metocean (approved for Spring / Summer 2023), Geophysics (in procurement, for Spring/Summer 2023), Geotechnical (in procurement, for Summer 2023), Birds and marine mammals (in procurement, estimated to start Spring 2023).