Expert Forum: Environmental Monitoring Around Turbines

Expert Forum #5

Lead by Andrea Copping, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
January 12, 2017

Summary:
As the first tidal turbine arrays are coming online, the opportunity to monitor environmental interactions and reduce uncertainty around key impacts is of increasing significance. To date, environmental monitoring methods have been wide ranging and have varied in success, often reflecting budget availability and operational restrictions around test deployments. There are however a number of projects that are now installed and operating around the world which have comprehensive, integrated environmental monitoring programs focused on reducing uncertainty and risk.

This provides a unique opportunity for strategic collaboration across projects and jurisdictions to help identify and solve common challenges associated with environmental monitoring and to ensure that the maximum value can be gained from the data gathered from these initial deployments and arrays.

This forum introduced the teams currently involved in environmental monitoring around operational tidal turbines and arrays, as well as those that have completed monitoring surveys. This initial expert forum also identified areas that warrant further discussion.

The slides presented are available here.

Experts who Participated in this Discussion Included (in order of appearance):

A video recording of the discussion has been posted below:

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