2nd Annual Pacific Region Marine Renewables Environmental Regulatory Workshop

Following a successful workshop at last year’s 11th Annual Ocean Renewable Energy Conference in Portland, Oregon, the Pacific Ocean Energy Trust will host the second marine energy environmental regulatory workshop before this year's conference.  Building on the outcome of the previous workshop, this year’s workshop (September 12, 2017) will revisit the status of individual interactions of stressors from marine renewable energy devices with marine animals, habitats, and ecosystem processes.  We will examine two specific interactions, delving into the potential of applying data from other locations or from other industries to new developments, and also explore the opportunity to narrow down the issues and standardize environmental monitoring programs for marine renewable energy devices.

The target audience for this invite-only event will be state and federal agency personnel, scientists/academics, and permitting specialists from the private sector.   This workshop fits into an ongoing process for POET and the marine renewables community to advance understanding of marine energy and its associated environmental effects, and to reduce the uncertainty and risk of these projects, especially for the many testing and demonstration projects that need to happen over the next 10 years. 

Invitations will be limited to 50 participants, in order to ensure open and effective dialogue.

Agenda:

• 9:00 am - 9:15 am         Convening and opening comments
• 9:15 am - 10:00 am       Background of the Workshop, intent, and State of the Science:  Andrea Copping and Sharon Kramer
• 10:15 am – 10:45 am     Reviewing and updating the Dashboards
• 10:45 am – 12:15 pm     Entanglement
• 12:15 pm – 1:15 pm       Working lunch – Experience from the development community 
• 1:15 pm -  2:45 pm        Collision Risk
• 2:45 pm – 3:00 pm        Break
• 3:00 pm – 5:00 pm        Next steps:
  • Gauging the Risk – Feedback from participants on their perceptions of risk for specific environmental issues to help guide the national research agenda: Andrea Copping, Sharon Kramer, Justin Klure.
  • Retirement and Allocation of Risk – How do we use the knowledge gained to reduce risk from deployments, and how do we allocate remaining risk to facilitate the many small and temporary deployments focused on moving the technologies toward commercialization.