France Energies Marines will launch six collaborative R&D offshore renewables projects with a total budget of €8m at the end of 2022.
These projects aim to address some of the challenges currently facing the sector: cyclone resistance of turbines, direct current electrical substations, impact and monitoring of biofouling, cumulative impacts of human activities, prioritisation of environmental issues, and supply of isolated electrical networks.
The projects involve 45 private and public partners and are in addition to 28 projects the institute already has underway.
Jean-Philippe Pagot, Chairman of France Energies Marines, said: “Identifying, proposing, organising, searching…finally finding, but searching again. Analysing, sharing, publishing, and searching again…. Every day, the France Energies Marines teams renew the initial promise to devote our human and financial resources to the responsible development of offshore renewable energy projects.”
Jean-François Filipot, Scientific Director of France Energies Marines, added: “With this new set of projects, France Energies Marines and its members will contribute to facilitating the implementation of France’s offshore wind deployment ambitions.
“The projects aim to make the offshore wind sector more competitive by making deployments in high-risk (cyclonic) areas safer, by anticipating the structural needs of the floating sector (such as substations) and by optimising the integration of farms into the environment.
“They also complement the efforts made by the Institute’s previous projects and those developed within other frameworks, such as SEMAFOR (co-funded by ADEME), which focuses on the characterisation of bird migratory flows, and HT-20MW (led by Eolink and co-funded by ADEME), which aims to define a new standard for 20 MW floating wind turbines.”