Inyanga Marine Energy Group is taking part in a pioneering project to harvest Earth observation data for offshore renewable energy.
The Penryn-based business is among seven European partners, including offshore renewable energy and Earth observation specialists, to team up for the BLUE-X project.
Together, they will develop a satellite-based decision support tool to accelerate offshore renewable energy deployments.
More than 75% of the EU’s greenhouse gas emissions are caused by the energy sector. The revised Renewable Energy Directive of 2023 raises the binding target to almost double the share of renewables within the EU until 2030.
Blue renewable energy sources such as offshore wind, offshore solar, wave and tidal energy have a high and mostly unused potential in times of a changing global energy policy. In 2020, the European Commission set the ambitious targets of 300 GW of offshore wind and 40 GW of ocean energy across all the European Union’s sea basins by 2050. However, achieving these calls for thorough and time-consuming MetOcean, geophysical and environmental campaigns.
Fiammetta Diani, head of market downstream and innovation at European Union Agency for the Space Programme (EUSPA), says that BLUE-X aims to help the acceleration of the energy transition in the European Union.
“Increasing the share of blue energy is a key building block for reaching the goals of the Green Deal,” she said. “Scaling up the use of Copernicus satellite data can support the rapid and fact-based decision-making needed.”
Inyanga MD, Richard Parkinson, added: “We will be contributing our unique expertise in tidal energy to help in the development of BLUE-X. Europe has access to some of the world’s best tidal resources, but these are currently underutilised. By providing key decision-making information for developers, BLUE-X will help to accelerate commercialisation of tidal energy and help unlock the full potential of this valuable energy resource.
“We expect this pioneering tool to have a powerful impact, helping to reduce project timescales and costs.”
For upscaling offshore renewables, BLUE-X will provide key data useful for all five steps of the blue energy lifecycle: site assessment, planning, construction, operations, and decommissioning. Six use cases across Europe will ensure a BLUE-X solution in line with the user demands of offshore renewable energy developers and providers. These cases will cover various blue offshore energy sources.
The consortium partners include Inyanga Marine Energy Group (UK/France), the Dutch Marine Energy Centre (DMEC, The Netherlands), EOMAP (Germany), Fórum Oceano (Portugal), INESC TEC (Portugal), Politecnico di Torino (Italy) and Wave for Energy (Italy).
