Innovation and Collaboration in Ocean Energy
As the OCEANERA-NET project comes to a close, the project’s Final Conference will be held over 2 days at the end of January in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Opportunities in Ocean energy
KTN in partnership within the OCEANERA-NET project have worked together to increase knowledge and speed up the development of the Ocean energy sector. Ocean energy includes the generation of renewable electricity from wave and tidal energy, salinity gradient and ocean thermal energy conversion.
Europe’s huge coastline can provide a similarly huge resource of ocean energy to be used as a renewable electricity source.   According to Ocean Energy Europe (the global network of ocean energy professionals) the ocean energy industry has plans to deploy 100GW of production capacity by 2050 in Europe alone.  This is enough to:
- address 10% of electricity demand (equivalent to 76 million households)
- create a new industrial sector based firmly in Europe
- create 400,000 skilled jobs all along the supply chain.
- make great inroads into the global marketplace, which is estimated to be worth 53€bn annually in 2050.
Co-ordinated effort across Europe
Since 2014, the KTN has been an active partner within the OCEANERA-NET project, which has worked to help increase knowledge and to speed the development of this emerging sector in pursuance of the huge potential prize.
Through a partnership of 15 national and regional funding bodies from 8 European countries, and two open calls for projects, 13 projects received funding support to progress sector Innovation and collaboration – see a list of funded projects.
Sector breakthrough
Each collaboration will have progressed the sector in some way, whether through technology development, generating new data and monitoring systems, or testing products and services in ‘real-life’ scenarios.
As the project comes to a close early in February 2018, the sector will be gathering at the project’s Final Conference, to be held over 2 days at the end of January in Edinburgh, Scotland (30th and 31st January 2018).
Entitled ‘Breaking Through: Innovation and Collaboration in Ocean Energy’, the event will be a celebration and presentation of achievements and an opportunity for the sector and aligned sectors to come together and discuss how the sector ‘breaks through’ in terms of commercialisation, deployment and sustainability.
Event Themes:
1.       How do we address sector challenges and successfully scale up ocean energy technology and businesses?
2.       How are businesses, funding bodies and research organisations approaching these challenges?
3.       What messages do we want to give to the outside world?
Amongst the interactive programme of events will be a session using the Unconference format, where the delegates set the Agenda. The general principle of this is that topics are generated by participants, and breakout groups are formed based on interest and relevance.  Here is a recent example: British Water РUnconference 2017 .
Register now to attend this free event.  Alternatively, contact Darren Hill (darren.hill@ktn-uk.org) for more details.