Understand and minimise the environmental impacts of offshore wind energy

Proposals are expected to address at least five of the following aspects:

• Provide better knowledge and understanding of the cumulative environmental impacts of the offshore wind energy deployment according to the EU targets, when added to the current and planned human activities carried out in the same areas;
• Expand existing studies, field monitoring, and analysis from local to larger areas, and from site- or species-specific impacts to more general ones. Further develop and deploy field monitoring activities, measuring multiple pressures and impacts on marine and coastal ecosystems and their services, as well as pollution, from installation to decommissioning and possible repowering, including operational phase and maintenance activities;
• Test and demonstrate field monitoring and modelling technologies that allow to go beyond state-of-knowledge, regarding life-cycle environmental impacts of offshore wind energy deployments;
• Improve instruments and models for Maritime Spatial Planning, and environmental assessments at plan and project level that are in alignment with public authorities’ needs;
• Improve modelling capacity and environmental impact assessments of future offshore wind deployment;
• Support the identification of areas where wind energy deployment is particularly suitable without significant environmental impact and areas where on the contrary, it should be avoided;
• Identify strategies, test, and demonstrate technologies that avoid, minimise, mitigate and compensate the environmental impact of bottom-fixed and floating offshore wind energy systems, propose mitigation and restoration measures and if feasible, provide net-positive environmental impacts. The activities carried out under this point are expected to achieve TRL 5 by the end of the project.

Particular attention must be dedicated to ensuring that the data produced in the context of this topic is FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable) and to leveraging existing community practices for data sharing especially those in the relevant European common data spaces and in the European Research infrastructures.

Complementarities with other ongoing and upcoming Horizon Europe projects are expected to be ensured as well as with the European Digital Twin of Ocean (European DTO) and its core infrastructure, for instance the projects funded under topics:

• HORIZON-CL6-2025-02-CLIMATE-02: The ocean-climate-biodiversity-people nexus: uncovering safe operating space for safeguarding the integrity and health of the global ocean;
• HORIZON-MISS-2025-03-OCEAN-08: EU Digital Twin Ocean: Contribution to the EU DTO core infrastructure through applications for sustainable ocean management;
• HORIZON-MISS-2023-OCEAN-01-06: Innovative nature-inclusive concepts to reconcile offshore renewables with ocean protection;
• HORIZON-MISS-2023-OCEAN-01-08: Integration of socio-ecological models into the Digital Twin Ocean;
• HORIZON-CL5-2024-D3-02-08 Minimisation of environmental, and optimisation of socio-economic impacts in the deployment, operation and decommissioning of offshore wind farms.

In addition to considering the most evident environmental impacts of offshore wind energy systems (displacement, collision risk, exposure to aerial and underwater noise, habitat loss and degradation, pollution, etc.), funded projects must include an analysis of possible new impacts, that may become particularly relevant when a high number of wind energy systems is deployed, for instance in relation to the decommissioning and removal of end-of-life offshore wind energy systems, the presence of dynamic cables suspended in the water column, the impact of submarine geohazards on the dynamic cables or the production of microplastics.

Environmental monitoring data must be open source and be shared with the European Marine Observation and Data Network (EMODnet) and the International Energy Agency Wind Energy Systems Technology Collaboration Programme’s (IEA Wind TCP) Task on the environmental effects of wind energy.