The Centre for Offshore Renewable Energy Research (CORER) united academics, researchers and postgraduate students with ambition to produce novel and fundamental scientific research within the offshore renewable energy field and disseminate research to industry to reduce inherent risks and uncertainties in the offshore renewable energy sector. Made up of Scientists from National Oceanography Centre, University of Liverpool, University of Southampton and Ocean University of China, the project provided transfer of knowledge and technical expertise to solve specific and real industry issues.
FLOW and Benthic ECology 4D (FLOWBEC) aims to improve the understanding of how the physical behaviour of the water such as currents, waves and turbulence at tide and wave energy sites influences the behaviour of marine wildlife, and how tide and wave energy devices might alter the behaviour of such wildlife.
The report presents an assessment of current academic literature and the latest industry reports to identify suitable technologies for generation of renewable energy from the Mersey Estuary, its surrounding docks and Liverpool Bay. It also contains a review of energy storage technologies that enable cost-effective use of renewable energy. The review is supplemented with case studies where technologies have been implemented elsewhere.
The EcoWatt2050 project is a 3-year project, funded by EPSRC, which was designed to explore the limits of deployment of marine renewable energy in Scotland. It follows on from the TeraWatt project, which identified modelling methodology for implementation of wave and tidal devices and quantified the resource, in order to explore more fully the environmental impacts of large-scale marine renewable deployments in conjunction with projected future climate in 2050.
Connectivity of Hard Substrate Assemblages in the North Sea (CHASANS) will deliver improved larval connectivity models necessary to provide guidance on decommissioning and derogation of artificial structures in the North Sea. Team expertise in epifaunal ecology, oceanographic modelling, and population genetics will be used to generate a multidisciplinary dataset to validate biologically realistic models of larval connectivity between sites in the North Sea. These models will be used to predict how networks of hard substrate in the North Sea function in the dispersal and metapopulation structure of marine epifauna.
