Regulators and advisors involved in consenting/permitting marine renewable energy (MRE) projects have faced multiple challenges due to the unfamiliarity with a relatively new technology and uncertainty surrounding potential environmental impacts. These challenges have contributed to slow progress for the MRE industry, including long consenting timeframes and extensive and expensive consenting/permitting requirements, which increase financial risk for investors. As the MRE industry continues to develop, understanding of its potential environmental effects has improved, although some uncertainty remains.
To address these challenges, OES-Environmental conducted a first iteration of regulator surveys between 2017 and 2021 in eight of the sixteen OES-Environmental countries. These surveys identified key environmental concerns, knowledge gaps, and outreach needs, helping to improve engagement with regulators and advisors and support the responsible development of the global MRE industry. The results from these surveys have been used to inform the development of the data transferability and risk retirement concepts in addition to the outreach strategy of OES-Environmental, and have been published in a conference paper (Freeman et al. 2020) and a journal article (Rose et al. 2023).
Building on this work, OES-Environmental began a second iteration of regulator surveys in 2025. The updated regulator survey uses adapted questions from the first iteration to capture evolving information needs related to environmental effects of MRE, increasing project scales, and emerging applications. Through this second survey iteration, OES-Environmental aims to better understand the long-term needs of regulators and advisors and to guide the development of targeted resources that address remaining uncertainties and critical knowledge gaps.
Click on the country flags or links below to view the survey report for each participating country.