46th ExCo Meeting in San Sebastian

Posted 2022-10-27 in News

The 46th ExCo Meeting was held in San Sebastian, Spain, on the 17th of October 2022, hosted by BiMEP.

The Executive Committee meeting of the IEA Technology Collaboration Programme on Ocean Energy Systems (IEA-OES) was hosted by BiMEP in San Sebastián, Basque Country, Spain, on the fringes of the conference and exhibition ICOE-OEE 2024, last week. The ExCo was welcomed by the Spanish Delegate Yago Torre-Enciso and Chaired by the French Delegate Yann-Hervé De Roeck.

Highlights from the meeting:

A new Cabinet of 4 members was appointed to enter into force in January 2023:  Matthijs Soede from the European Commission as the new Chair and Purnima Jalihal from the National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT), Christophe Gaudin from the University of Western Australia and Tim Ramsey from the US Department of Energy, as Vice-Chairs.

The Australian Blue Economy CRC was approved by the ExCo as the host of the International Conference on Ocean Energy ICOE-2024, to be held on 18-20 September 2024 at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre, Australia.

A new project was initiated and will run over the next 6 months: Vision and International Implementation Strategy for the Development and Deployment of Ocean Energy,  a study that will be prepared by the Policy and Innovation Group of the University of Edinburgh, in collaboration with the US Department of Energy and the Nanyang University at Singapore, with inputs from the ExCo. The study is expected to be completed by the middle of next year.

A new task on the Economics of OTEC was initiated and will run over the next 9 months, conducted by two external experts on the topic - Benjamin Martin of Xenesys and Luis Vega - under the supervision of a steering committee of delegates with activities on OTEC in their countries: India, China, Japan, Korea, Singapore, France and The Netherlands.

A new publication under the Task on Performance Metrics was released: “Supporting Ocean Energy Technology Development and Commercialisation: Coherent Application of Guidance, Standards and Certification” a joint publication from the IEA-OES and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC).

The OES Task on Tidal Energy Resource Modelling has now 28 experts looking to the great multitude of tools and techniques used to quantify the resources available in different parts of the world, establishing a standard in extractable resource modelling. A publication summarising the work is planned to be published next year.

A decision was taken to engage with the Wind TCP on a collaborative task on bottom to surface components for floating offshore wind and ocean energy technology, exploring synergies and sharing knowledge.
New developments were discussed on the upgrade of the existing OES Web Gis database in collaboration with the US PRIMRE team, with the support of NREL. A new interactive platform will be released next year.

Outstanding progress on the OES-Environmental over 2022 was presented including a new publication with information on the potential impacts of installation and operation of ocean energy devices targeted to regulators published early this year, the available educational resources prepared on this topic, and all OES-Environmental activities documented on Tethys. Almost 4,000 documents on MRE!