The European Commission has launched a call for expression of interest open to all relevant stakeholder organisations to become a member of a new working group on offshore renewable energy.
The deadline for applications is September 10.
The mandate of the group will be to help contribute to reaching the EU’s offshore renewable energy ambitions of an installed capacity of at least 60GW offshore wind and at least 1GW of ocean energy by 2030, with a view to achieving capacity of at least 300GW and 40GW respectively by 2050.
The working group will identify and define the challenges which the sector faces and potential implementation bottlenecks for reaching the 2030 and 2050 goals – and develop recommendations for overcoming these.
Amongst others, this is likely to focus on the critical value chain, the different supply chain segments, and associated investments – all of which need to be scaled up in order to ensure that EU renewables deployment targets can be met in a sustainable way.
The members of the working group will be decided in the first half of September with the first meeting likely in mid-October.
Ireland could become energy ‘superpower’
Floating wind energy can transform Ireland into a European renewable energy superpower, if the right policies are put in place to enable industry to start building floating wind farms in the 2020s.
This is the central finding of ‘Revolution: A vision for Irish floating wind energy’, published recently by Wind Energy Ireland (WEI), which sets out how floating wind farms can make Ireland a world leader in producing renewable energy and fighting climate change.
The Programme for Government contains a target for 5,000MW of offshore wind energy by 2030 and, in the long-term, 30,000MW off the western coast, which would enable Ireland to power itself and to export large amounts of clean energy to Europe, according to WEI.