Can nature and offshore wind farms work in harmony?

Protecting our planet means taking urgent action on building clean energy and supporting vibrant ecosystems. The two ambitions can be compatible, but this requires collaboration, writes Kate Wallace-Lockhart.

Kate Wallace-Lockhart is the head of sustainability at SSE Renewables.

How do you balance the need to build vast amounts of offshore wind in Europe’s waters without damaging what is already a fragile ecosystem? This presents a significant dilemma for many policymakers: should we prioritise energy or ecology?

And finding answers is increasingly urgent. Earlier this year EU member states agreed to almost double their previous target for offshore wind to 111GW by 2030 and reach more than 300GW by 2050.

Getting there will not only require a massive effort from industry, but also a far faster permitting process than has previously been the case. And this relies on collaboration.

The reality is, we can’t be sustainable if we don’t tackle the climate emergency. But we can tackle the climate emergency in an unsustainable way. And the climate emergency and biodiversity emergency go hand in hand.

One way – and probably the only way – to balance the need for speed with the urgency to not only protect but enhance Europe’s marine environment is for developers, other sea users, governments, regulators and NGOs to work together on a viable way forward.

But how?

The role of technology

Technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), are developing fast and can be successfully applied to protect ecosystems, too. By increasing knowledge of the environment we operate in, we can find innovative solutions to build out renewables in the most cost-effective manner, while also protecting nature.

The better informed we are about the impacts of a project – either negative or positive – the faster we develop mitigations and make consenting decisions, and the quicker we can build out the clean energy infrastructure we all want to see.

This is particularly true for offshore infrastructure, where knowledge of marine science is still relatively limited.  A lot of research has been carried out in this field but much more is still needed.

For example, at the 588MW offshore Beatrice wind farm in the North of Scotland, local puffin colonies are monitored using cameras that gather footage and use AI to automatically detect and count the birds during their breeding season.  It can even go as far as identifying individual birds so that it doesn’t count the same puffin twice.

This not only helps wind farm developers understand how sea life reacts to human activity, but also gives valuable information to scientists and conservationists, and advances our shared knowledge of species in a marine environment.

A lesson from the North Sea

Beatrice is interesting for lots of reasons – not least because it used to be an oil field before transitioning to clean energy.

Today, it is home to 84 turbines able to power up to 450,000 homes. Instead of some marine life moving away from the area where the wind farm is located, in some cases the opposite has happened.

Some species have started to colonise the jacket legs of the infrastructure. We don’t yet know why this is happening, but we are carefully monitoring, analysing, and sharing this data to gain more insights.

While these anecdotal stories are interesting, we need more research to better understand the complex interactions between renewable energy infrastructure and local ecosystems.

A common ‘toolbox’

Many developers in Europe and beyond are stepping up to this challenge. However, a common ‘toolbox’ would help industry to understand their baseline, and then set credible goals and the robust actions needed to get there. The harder it is to measure impacts, the harder it is to do more of what is right for the local ecosystem.

The lack of common standards and benchmarks applies to both marine as well as to terrestrial biodiversity. Independent experts helped develop a methodology with SSE Renewables, using existing toolkits used to quantify the impact of large-scale onshore wind farms.

Using these toolkits – which are in the public domain and free for anybody to use – we are able to demonstrate, in quantifiable terms that, from now on, we will achieve no biodiversity loss on our newly consented major renewables projects onshore, with a measurable biodiversity net gain from 2025 at the latest.

However, in offshore wind, the understanding of the local ecosystems is less advanced.

And while the deployment of wind technology accelerates across Europe, there is a need for a more systematic approach involving developers, policymakers, scientists, academics, communities, NGOs and others to avoid duplicating effort and instead agree on a common way forward.

Offshore wind is a highly competitive market but in areas such as protecting the natural world, there is a clear imperative for working together. EU institutions are best positioned to promote collaboration and transparency across the industry.

The important role of policy

Policy changes will be crucial. For example, making use of the so-called ‘non-price criteria’ in offshore seabed auctions. This is an emerging tool that aims at rewarding those projects that deliver the highest long-term value to society, including the environment, rather than just focusing on price alone.

Although low prices serve an important social purpose today, failure to account for wider societal costs could lead to greater costs for us all in the future.

However, to be successful, these need to be implemented in a credible manner, assessed in a transparent way, and developers must be held accountable if they do not deliver.

Protecting our planet means taking urgent action on building clean energy and supporting vibrant ecosystems. The two ambitions can be compatible, but this requires collaboration. The more we work together on these challenges, the faster we’ll deliver the truly sustainable energy system we all want to see.