GL Garrad Hassan at Husum WindEnergy 2012

GL Garrad Hassan report examines offshore wind potential in Baltic Sea Region.
 

The Baltic Sea has great offshore wind potential. The development of offshore wind resources will be vital for many of the Baltic nations, as they look to meet their commitments to boost renewable energy generation. GL Garrad Hassan, part of the GL Group's renewables business segment, has presented a new report outlining the potential for large scale offshore wind power deployment in the Baltic Sea Region (BSR).

The report was sponsored by the Baltic Sea Region Energy Cooperation (BASREC), a Ministerial process designed to promote sustainable growth, security and prosperity in the region through the energy sector. "We undertook an analysis of the offshore energy generation potential in the BSR and how deployment of generation capacity in the region could be accelerated, through an examination of attractive areas for development, grid and interconnection issues, and the regulatory and market conditions in the BSR nations." explained David Williams, GL Garrad Hassan.

The report is designed to give the BASREC partners (Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Denmark, Germany, Poland, Russia and the European Commission), a set of concrete initiatives on which they can cooperate to promote offshore wind power.

From the analysis two sets of strategic initiatives for the region were provided.  The first detailed actions required to fulfil renewable energy targets for 2020, while the second detailed those actions recommended to position the BSR as a world leader in offshore wind development.  The strategic initiatives are based around four themes; policy and regulation, research and demonstration, grid integration and environmental planning.

Jörg Neubauer, Project Manager, Swedish Energy Agency, commented on the study "The team conducted this complex task in a straight forward and skilled action along a firm time line. We are already seeing strategic discussions taking off and are looking forward to the concrete offspring of these talks, as we further our cooperative efforts to develop offshore wind in the coming BASREC working period."

The release of the report marks the first time in the BSR that strategic initiatives to build cross border cooperations for the deployment of offshore wind generation have been identified, based on an integrated and internationally applicable analysis. The report was based on a study undertaken by a team from GL Garrad Hassan's Strategy & Policy Unit, supported by Deloitte Business Consulting.