Ireland’s Department of the Environment Climate and Communications (DECC) has contracted BVG Associates to provide technical advisory services to assess the potential to deploy offshore renewable energy including floating wind at scale in Ireland.
The contract was signed in August 2024, according to an award notice published in the Supplement to the Official Journal of the EU.
The contract followed the Future Framework for Offshore Renewable Energy that the Irish government issued in May 2024. The framework sets a target of 20 GW of offshore wind by 2040 and 37 GW by 2050 and outlines a roadmap of how they would be achieved. One of the action points is assessing the potential to deploy floating offshore wind at scale in Irish waters.
The Future Framework policy statement was also informed, among other things, by reports BVG Associates and AFRY provided to DECC, including studies of the market, interconnection, renewable hydrogen, export viability, and societal return.
Before the framework was released, the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI) carried out a national-scale assessment of the technical potential of offshore wind, wave, and tidal energy in Irish waters for the government’s Second Offshore Renewable Energy Development Plan (OREDP II). According to SEAI’s estimates, Ireland holds a gross technical resource capacity of 62 GW for fixed-bottom offshore wind and 579 GW for floating wind.
Ireland’s long-term plan for increasing its offshore renewable energy capacity is three-phased: Phase One, which awarded capacity in the first offshore wind auction (ORESS 1), Phase Two which will procure the additional offshore wind capacity required to meet the 2030 target, and the fully plan-led Future Framework that leads to 37 GW of offshore renewable energy capacity in 2050.