As part of a partnership with leading scientists to improve monitoring of marine life, RWE has launched the SeaMe project at its 342MW Kaskasi offshore wind farm off the German coast.
The objective is to gain a comprehensive understanding of the interactions between offshore wind farms and the ecosystem through the use of a sound scientific approach, together with new AI-based and CO2 minimising monitoring technologies.
RWE Offshore Wind chief executive Sven Utermöhlen said: “As a global leading player in offshore wind, we feel responsible for building and operating our wind farms in harmony with nature.
“To deliver green electricity, we invest billions of euros annually in offshore wind.
“We are committed to expanding our portfolio in an environmentally friendly way. With this in mind, we have set ourselves ambitious sustainability targets and are making all efforts to find ways to improve.
“With the SeaMe project we are pioneering new techniques that will enable us to better understand the impact of offshore wind on the marine ecosystem.”
It is already mandatory by law in many countries to assess and monitor the state of the environment where offshore wind farms are developed, built and operated. These legal requirements, however, often focus on monitoring individual groups of organisms (e.g. fish, marine mammals, birds), and there has been no holistic approach to data gathering, said RWE.
Thanks to new technologies, the simultaneous collection of data and effective data management, the SeaMe project (which stands for Sustainable ecosystem approach in Monitoring the marine environment) will enable the developer to consider the ecosystem as a whole.
One aim of the scheme is to monitor key components of the marine ecosystems that are usually left out of conventional monitoring programmes, such as small phytoplankton and zooplankton, which play a vital role in feeding larger animals.
In addition, a series of physical parameters such as temperature, salinity and oxygen will be measured to explain any possible changes in the distribution and abundance of species.
The joint project will investigate how innovative techniques can make monitoring less invasive and more sustainable compared to the current monitoring techniques.
Whereas planes and ships are routinely used to monitor birds and mammals, SeaMe plans to replace these methods with a drone equipped with an AI-based camera system.
The project will also collect water samples and analyse them for environmental DNA.
AI-based fish video monitoring will be performed using an autonomous underwater vehicle. Both methods will replace the traditional means of sampling the fish using nets, making the entire process less invasive.
The three-year project will be carried out in collaboration with partners including the Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity at the University of Oldenburg, the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, BioConsult SH, Danish company DHI A/S and the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence.
The plan is to share the results on a dedicated online public platform.
All tests will take place at RWE’s Kaskasi offshore wind farm (pictured), located 35km off the coast of the German island of Heligoland.