The European Technology and Innovation Platform for Ocean Energy (TP Ocean) is developing a program of activities for the next two years designed to tackle ocean energy challenges.
Starting with the Strategic Research Agenda (SRA), released in November 2016 with the goal of increasing reliability, while reducing risk and technology costs across the ocean energy sector, TPOcean is working on prioritizing research and innovation (R&I) topics.
The prioritization is said to serve a twofold purpose; to inform research programs as to the key challenges faced by the sector, and to structure TPOcean activities for the next two years.
The identified challenges will be divided into three broad areas: technology, financing, environment, and socio-economics, according to TP Ocean.
TPOcean informed that a series of webinars and brokerage events, set up to discuss the issues within the emerging ocean renewables sector and the ways to overcome them, are planned to take place between April 2017 and November 2018.
Also, TP Ocean plans to develop educational material on the ocean energy sector that can be adapted to science, engineering or other technical courses.
The results of these activities will be collected in a single Integrated Strategy document to be released in November 2018, TP ocean informed.
TP Ocean is regarded as an advisory body to the European Commission. It is managed by Ocean Energy Europe and the University of Edinburgh, bringing together around 250 experts from 150 organisations covering the entire European ocean energy sector.