May 17, 2017 @ 9:00 - 10:30 PDT
Summary
The Pacific Region Marine Renewables Environmental Regulatory Workshop was held in conjunction with the 11th Annual Ocean Renewable Energy Conference in Portland, Oregon, on September 21, 2016 in response to concerns about permitting processes for MRE development being long, drawn out, challenging, and prohibitively expensive, even for small projects and pilot-scale deployments.
The workshop participants included federal and state regulators, MHK developers, and researchers. Two documents—Annex IV 2016 State of the Science Report and A Review of the Environmental Impacts for Marine Hydrokinetic Projects to Inform Regulatory Permitting: Summary Findings from the 2015 Workshop on Marine Hydrokinetic Technologies, Washington D.C.—were presented to the participants. Estimates of the perceived risks to the marine environment (“dashboards”) for key interactions were also presented and discussed.
The key indicators include: effects of underwater noise from MRE devices; effects of EMF from cables and devices; entanglement in mooring lines; collision risk; and changes in physical systems from MRE development. The purpose of the dashboards is to provide a snapshot of how we understand the risk of interactions now, and are designed to be updated as more research and monitoring information becomes available.
This webinar will showcase the outcome of the event and subsequent report (available here), and we will discuss how the dashboard metrics for assessing risk related to MHK technologies can be used to help retire risk and improve the regulatory permitting process.
Presenters:
- Jason Busch, Executive Director at Pacific Ocean Energy Trust
- Andrea Copping, Senior Scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
- Sharon Kramer, Senior Fish Ecologist and Principal at H. T. Harvey & Associates
A video recording of the webinar has been posted below: