Environmental Acceptability of Marine Energy Projects to Help Streamline Permitting Processes​

The OES-Environmental team at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is hosting an interactive workshop at the 2026 University Marine Energy Research Community Annual Conference (UMERC) + Marine Energy Technology Symposium (METS) from 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM ET on 4 August 2026 in Hoboken, New Jersey, USA.

Ocean Energy Systems (OES)-Environmental has been working to advance approaches that support environmentally responsible deployment of marine renewable energy (MRE) technologies worldwide. As wave and tidal energy devices vary widely in design, scale, and operating environments internationally—and relatively few systems are in operation—regulators, developers, and communities often face challenges in consistently evaluating potential environmental interactions and determining whether proposed projects are environmentally acceptable. To address this need, OES-Environmental has been developing an environmental acceptability decision support tool that organizes information on device archetypes, key design features, location-specific information, and environmental stressor-receptor interactions to help assess environmental risk and make recommendations to improve environmental outcomes across the MRE project lifecycle.

This workshop will share information on the development of the tool to gain feedback on the structure, user experience, and recommendations provided using two use cases. One use case will focus on tidal energy and collision risk, and the other will focus on wave energy and underwater noise. Participants will have the opportunity to provide feedback across technical and environmental dimensions of marine energy based on their experience. This will improve the utility of the tool and serve to increase awareness of OES-Environmental work in order to better support environmentally responsible development of marine energy from design, siting, installation, operation, maintenance, and decommissioning. Eventually, this tool will enable regulators to ask more risk-appropriate modifications to projects or monitoring programs, which would lead to more streamlined permitting processes.