In order to address the growing global demand for energy, industry is looking to extract energy from renewable sources such as wind, waves, and tides. Yet potential environmental effects must be evaluated and measured to ensure that animals, habitats, and ecosystem functions are not adversely affected, nor that existing ocean and land uses be displaced. The goal of Tethys is to progress industry in an environmentally-responsible manner.
Tethys, named after the Greek titaness of the sea, was launched in 2011 by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) to support the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Wind Energy Technologies Office and Water Power Technologies Office. The primary functions of Tethys are twofold:
- To facilitate the exchange of information and data on the environmental effects of marine and wind energy technologies; and
- To serve as a commons for marine and wind energy practitioners and therefore enhance the connectedness of the renewable energy community as a whole.
The growing body of content in Tethys is actively collected and curated by researchers at PNNL from a variety of sources. Members of the community are also encouraged to contribute to Tethys by identifying documents not yet in the collection.
Tethys supports a growing community of researchers, regulators, and developers through outreach and communication channels including the Tethys Stories, pertinent organizations, databases with similar missions, and broadcasts of presentations, webinars, seminars, and symposia relating to the environmental effects of marine and wind energy. As the Tethys community expands and more users create accounts, each user’s personal interests and areas of expertise may be catalogued upon request to facilitate more communication among Tethys community members.
Together with other DOE national laboratories, National Marine Renewable Energy Centers, universities, and industry, Tethys contributes to a program of research and development focused on unraveling the complexity of environmental issues associated with marine and wind energy technologies. Tethys provides a number of ways to sort and search for data, connect with the research community, and learn more about the current status of the industry.
Use of Tethys
Tethys cultivates a collaborative research space for the exchange of technical information on the effects of marine and wind energy devices and their associated components. Tethys has been developed with the following user groups in mind:
- Project Developers can view research findings that will assist with siting renewable projects while minimizing risk to the environment;
- Regulatory Agency Staff will find support for permitting processes and natural resource management decisions to assist with streamlining the permitting process;
- Stakeholders may be interested in the industry or in a proposed project's location and/or associated environmental studies that have been carried out;
- Researchers can easily sift through relevant environmental documents to assist in studies and identify pressing research gaps.
The following resources detail the use and content on Tethys:
Content in Tethys
Tethys is a database that collects and disseminates content related to the environmental effects of marine energy (wave, tidal, ocean current, riverine, ocean thermal, salinity gradient) and wind energy (land-based, fixed offshore wind, floating offshore wind). Content is typically structured into environmental stressors and receptors, where stressors are the technology component that is affecting the environment, and the receptor is the organism or habitat that is being effected. Content is actively collected and curated by a trained content team to assure high quality of information. Specific content includes:
- Documents - journal articles, technical reports, conference papers, books, theses, and more.
- Webinars - Tethys hosts many webinars from OES-Environmental, WREN, SEER, and other groups.
- Marine Energy Project Sites - Details about environmental effects and monitoring at deployments around the world, collected by OES-Environmental.
- Offshore Wind Project Sites - Details about environmental monitoring at offshore wind sites around the world, collected by WREN.
- Interactive Tools - Tethys hosts interactive views with unique content for the marine or wind energy content, including the MRE Management Measures Tool, MRE Educational Resources, MRE Socioeconomic Toolkit, Wind Technologies Tool, and Pacific Wind Project Finder.
Tethys content can be found on the Tethys Knowledge Base and a subset can be found on the Tethys Map Viewer. You can also sign up to receive Tethys Blast, a bi-weekly newsletter that highlights industry news, job opportunities, and conference deadlines, and Tethys content.
Technologies Covered
Tethys provides information on the environmental effects of the following technologies:
- Marine Energy: The generation of renewable energy from tides, waves, currents, salinity, and temperature gradients in the oceans, seas, and rivers.
- Ocean Current Energy: Capturing energy from ocean currents.
- Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion: Capturing energy using temperature gradients across water depths.
- Riverine Energy: Capturing energy from river currents, excluding traditional .
- Salinity Gradient Energy: Capturing energy from salinity gradients where freshwater meets seawater.
- Tidal Energy: Capturing energy from tidal fluctuations.
- Wave Energy: Capturing energy from waves.
- Wind Energy: The generation of renewable energy from the wind, either land-based or offshore.
- Land-Based Wind Energy: Capturing energy from onshore wind.
- Fixed Offshore Wind Energy: Capturing energy from offshore wind using fixed platforms.
- Floating Offshore Wind Energy: Capturing energy from offshore wind using floating foundations.
Tethys Development Framework
Tethys has been developed using Drupal, a modern content management system that supports semantic data management. Content is structured into related content types and vocabularies to provide organization between content and to support interoperability with other databases through metadata federation. Tethys draws on many years of software and systems development from the PNNL Drupal Development Team, allowing users to semantically search and organize data through tagging individual files, documents, and multimedia products. Tethys is monitored and all content is quality assured and curated to ensure that content is current and accurate. Feedback and suggestions from users are actively encouraged; please contact us. The Tethys team is routinely upgrading functionality and content based on user input.