OceaNET
Start date: Sep 1, 2013,
End date: Aug 31, 2017
PROJECT
FINISHED
OceaNET concerns floating offshore wind and wave energy. These two areas are well aligned with the European Energy Strategic Plan and the Horizon 2020 programme.It aims at contributing to develop specific technologies and enabling technologies common to both energy sources. The research activities are structured in a number of research projects, which will provide the opportunity for a set of young researchers to be trained in first class European Research & Development (R&D) institutes, universities and companies active in these areas. This hands-on training will be complemented with a number of short courses on enabling technologies, relevant for farm development, and on associated economic, environmental and societal issues required for their future integration in the market. The training programme will be complemented by secondments in selected industrial companies.OceaNET will be developed in close collaboration with EIT’s KIC InnoEnergy OTS project. KIC InnoEnergy is a pan-European non-for-profit company, mainly funded by the European Institute for Innovation and Technology (EIT), devoted to enhance the education-research-innovation triangle by developing innovative industrial products. OTS project concerns the development of four innovative products for offshore wind and wave energy farms, namely an environmental monitoring hardware and software package, underwater electrical connectors and associated ROVs, air turbine for oscillating water column (OWC) wave energy converters and an O&M support software package. The integration of floating offshore wind and wave energy in the training and research programmes results from both being in a similar status of development (the first farms are coming up in 2012) and sharing the same enabling technologies, licensing, survivability, O&M issues and stakeholders, requiring well-trained professionals with the same background, which at present is still not well integrated in existing university courses.