Offshore Energy and Storage Summit-OSES 2019

The OSES conference series addresses offshore energy systems – with major emphasis on the word “systems”. Offshore wind has dominated the arena of energy harvesting offshore – and it has done a superb job of showing just how rich the energy resources are offshore and how inexpensively these energy resources can be exploited. Expectations on cost reduction for all offshore energy systems are now driving innovations like never before. This is probably more true for offshore wind than for any other offshore energy form. In the past, the presence of subsidies has meant that the offshore wind technology developers could take what was essentially a design for onshore wind turbines, scale it up, marinise the nacelle and then support the turbine on a tower that looks as much as possible like the towers supporting onshore machines.

The paradigm of trying to take energy systems developed for application on land and port them into the marine environment is now being challenged fatally. Logic calls for machines to be optimised to the environment for which they intended and not simply to emulate machines that have been optimised for a very different environment. Perhaps surprisingly, it will be system cost that actually drives the innovation in future.

OSES2019 will focus especially on systems that are designed with marine DNA already in their blood. This will include floating platforms for both wind turbines and PV collectors, hybrid systems that cater for the collection of energy in multiple forms, the integration of energy storage with electricity generation and various energy harvesting approaches that simply have no equivalent on land.

OSES2019 will be a significant agent of change – helping the community to observe that the future of offshore energy is not simply a linear extrapolation of the past.