 Hi everyone, hope you're doing fine. Welcome to today's webinar hosted by the Stockholm Environment Institute's Gridless Initiative. My name is Karina Burkett. I'm a senior researcher at SCI. I'm also a team lead for the Water Post and Ocean Group and lead for the Gridless Initiative solution hosting the event today. I would like to walk you through today's agenda as well as some instructions. My colleagues will be posting some information in the chat. Please have an eye. Today we will be looking into something promising, something upcoming and yet slightly experimental. We will be exploring whether multi-purpose platforms also called multi-use platforms also use multifunctional platforms in the ocean can help us fast track the expansion of renewable energy production. We will learn about new research and the potential of combining offshore wind and hydrogen power with an expert panel mapping and what should be the next steps. As you might recall in the recent climate meeting COP 28, countries committed to triple renewable energy production by 2030, but this is going to require massive transformations of the energy sector and we will be placing huge demands on our ocean. So today we will be discussing a promising solution or at least a solution held as a promising solution marine platforms which have the potential for combining offshore wind farms and share the space with for example floating solar or wave energy, aquaculture or hydrogen production. This is explored in a new policy brief author my colleagues Widomasa and Maria Silje, where they describe the potential for this solution and what's currently holding them back. We also have two special guests today that will provide opinions and some thoughts about this development, Celine Franks, a policy officer from the EU Commission and DJ Mare and Mane Meister and Alessandro Tampieri You're welcome to post your questions in the chat. There's a special function. You don't need to wait until the end. You can just post them throughout and we'll try to pick them up later on. The webinar will be closing down with some final thoughts. Before we move on I'd like to introduce you very very shortly to the initiative hosting this work, the grid list initiative. It has been running for four years and it's essentially looking at the provision of critical services particularly water, sanitation and energy beyond the centralized grid. So we look at different nuances or shades of decentralization where the micro many grids totally decentralized and the various functions that don't necessarily build on the grid at work. This is where multifunction platforms come in. They could be centralized but they could be also decentralized and this is part of what we do and Maria will talk about today. I could talk about grid list solutions for a long time but that's not my job today. Instead I will hand over to my colleague Maria to start off today's presentation. Maria, the floor is yours. Thanks a lot Karina and welcome to everyone. We will talk today about the marine multifunctional mobile and modular solutions we explore in the grid list initiative. I'm a senior researcher at SEI in the energy and industry transitions team and what we set out in the beginning of this project to do was to see how the literature defines the solutions and what are the most attractive options we have for the time being and for the future. So starting from the marine world we have seen different kinds of applications of wind energy, wave energy, even aquaculture at the individual level. So solutions that are independently standing on their own usually with the use of platforms at SEI they can be mobile, they can be static but still having this independent installation aspect to them. What we try to explore is how multifunctionality comes in and we have the common concepts of multi-use which can be about the simultaneous provision and clustering of services. You can use the same structure, you can use the same resource as energy or water or anything else or you can use the same location, the co-location services. So usually the definition of multifunctional is the co-use, the coexistence or the co-location either based on economic interaction or spatial proximity or research on location where the enforce come in is that we try to add concepts that we want to introduce to fully capture the potential of these marine gridless solutions and that's two main aspects that we're looking into and that's mobility and modularity. The mobility can be either continuous, we're talking about power ships or other kinds of vessels that provide services combining different uses and functions but it can be also intermittent the possibility to move some structure from one place to the other and also modularity which is the division of a system sometimes very complex to individual components which makes it easier to assemble, disassemble and also build up or down depending on need. So we looked into solutions that are as mentioned marine, multifunctional, mobile and modular and all of these together combined we call them M-force, this is something that will come up as a term throughout this webinar and it's an introduction of a term that we did at SCI in order to capture this full perspective of multifunctionality at sea. What we do here is zooming in on specific multifunctionality aspects exploring the correlations between different technologies and also analyzing what are the common themes that we see in research and development. So what are these themes is that we have very little on all four aspects if you look at the existing literature and discussions we don't see the marine, multifunctional, mobile and modular being combined that often. Mobility, modularity are the least explored and we hope through this webinar and the discussions we said today that we get more in this direction. A lot of the studies that we see if you're looking into the research world are theoretical so we don't really know what is really feasible to combine and at what scale it is feasible to combine it. We see that there are co-benefits and synergies they make more sense with multifunctionality but we lack the capturing of the outside non-English speaking world if we just look at the peer-reviewed literature. So we started by taking the outlook on what the research on marine multifunctional, modular, mobile solutions is about and we tried to map a little bit what kind of studies we had. We reviewed a lot of studies about 2000s, bolded down to 70 approximately studies that we went really into detail and here you can see the mapping of how the different technologies and solutions are combined in multi-use platforms. Offshore wind is the most common technology and the combination with wave accounts for almost half of the studies that we looked into so quite popular solutions there. Aquaculture is sometimes mentioned along multifunctional solutions as an opportunity to expand a little bit beyond the energy world when it comes to co-benefits and synergies but what we really want to focus on today is actually the combination of wind and hydrogen which was highlighted in only five of the studies that we reviewed in literature but it's very popular in the outside world let's say with a lot of developments around the world and a lot of discussion on what the potential with it can be. So we would like to give a perspective on this good combination of multi-use in C. So my colleague Guido now will talk about our investigation of how offshore wind and hydrogen is combined today and what is the outlook for the future. Thanks a lot, off to you Guido. Hi everyone, thanks for joining. I'm Guido and I was an SCI intern last year and the brief that we're going to be discussing is the result of the work that we were doing while I was there. So as Maria mentioned following the literature review that they did on the team we wanted to get a sense of how these projects were doing outside of the academic environment and so we focused on assessing the current state of commercially focused M4 projects and to do that we centered a research around three main questions that you should be seeing on the screen and what we wanted to do is we wanted to shed light on the outlook of the projects the barriers that they were facing like if there are so many projects planned why are we seeing why are we not seeing so many of them in the water and also we wanted to get an idea of which use combinations were leading the way and see if we could assess them with hard numbers. So the way we decided to go about this was to split the work in three stages. The first one was to do a systematic review of online information to identify and to classify existing projects. Then we did a series of semi-structured interviews with stakeholders that were active in the field and finally we decided to do a techno-economic analysis on a combination that stood out from the first two stages and well spoiler alert it was offshore wind and hydrogen. So on the first stage what we found was that most of the projects were somehow centered on combining wind energy with something else and that didn't come as a surprise considering the growth of offshore wind in recent years and especially here in Europe. Most of the projects were centered around energy production or transport transmission and combining wind energy with wave energy solar energy and hydrogen production. The combination of wind and hydrogen was by far the most common as Maria mentioned with a total of 11 projects out of the 30 that we found and another combination that stood out and that has been increasingly receiving a lot of attention is that of combining offshore wind with aquaculture and that can be seaweed aquaculture, mussels, scallop, farmings we're seeing a lot of these projects starting to come together. In terms of geographical distribution though we found that just as was the case with the academic research Europe has been leading the way and 75% of the projects were located in European waters and a notable exception is China where we found four projects that were all centered around combining wind energy with aquaculture and overall we found that all the projects were at an early stage of development with 28 out of the 30 projects being at a concept phase or doing pilot testing so we are not really expecting widespread commercial deployment in the short term. Moving on to the stakeholder interviews we decided to structure them around six main areas so as a general consideration we found that combining different energy sources was perceived as the most intuitive and the simplest combination whereas combining completely different industries of course started to introduce more complexity and that could be from a technical point of view logistics and also in terms of establishing liabilities within users. On the technical side a common theme was that there are no major technological barriers since most of the equipment already exists but however some technologies are still considered immature. This is also where the benefits of modularity were mentioned the most as it was mentioned that building modular units could make construction transport and installation easier and you could also use for example smaller maintenance vessels and swap faulty units while the rest are still working so in the end you could get savings in operation and maintenance and also lower down times. Here the need for large-scale demonstrations was mentioned as the most critical factor as it would create reliable data on how the systems work together and that could help really bridge the gap between research and commercial deployment. In terms of strategy we wanted to see who the most influential players were and where the stakeholders thought the largest potential was lying. So we found that large developers and policymakers were perceived to have the most influence and that the partnerships between technology developers and project developers were the most common as the developers are the ones that have the financial and operational capabilities and the OEMs are the ones that are developing these key technologies and as for the combinations with most potential again the combination of different renewables and their integration with hydrogen and the combination of offshore wind and aquaculture were mentioned the most here. We also asked about the main economic advantages and disadvantages and as we already mentioned savings in operation and maintenance was was key here and was mentioned a lot and in the case of hydrogen it was mentioned that it could either reduce curtailment if you're using it as an alternative source of offtake for your energy or if you're producing exclusively hydrogen then you can reduce your levelized production costs. As for disadvantages of course we found that these projects require large investments so they are not really accessible to anyone who might want to start one. Additionally the current business cases are fairly uncertain because of the maturity of the technologies and the supply chains because and also because there's not that much real-world data out there on the cost of operating them so again the need for demonstrations was stressed here as well. In terms of policy and regulation we found that in general projects are faced with commerce and permitting procedures and in most regions also multi-use is not really contemplated and exclusive rights are still kind of the guiding principle. So developing regulatory frameworks that enable and incentivize the sharing of ocean space could really help speed things up and unsurprisingly the lack of such a regulatory environment was mentioned as one of the main barriers as multi-use is being applied in really in only a few places from a regulatory standpoint and well the maturity of the technologies as I mentioned before and of the supply chains on some markets was mentioned again here and we are seeing this over different industries and we even see it a lot in offshore wind now with various trained supply chains that are exerting a lot of pressure in many projects and finally was pointed out that the exclusive focus that the countries are putting on achieving the lowest price of energy means that there is an uneven playing field where newest technologies really can't compete. Then finally in the last stage of our research which is the the main focus of our brief we decided to conduct the techno economic analysis and the production of hydrogen from offshore wind. This is because as we showed it was the most commonly occurring project that we found and it was also cited as a very promising use case during the during the interviews. So to do that we decided to evaluate the levelized cost of hydrogen of three different production strategies and compare them. The levelized cost of hydrogen by the way is an indicator that shows the cost of producing one kilogram of hydrogen when you consider the total investment and operational costs throughout the lifetime of your project. The three strategies that we were comparing they compared onshore and offshore production and within offshore production we were comparing centralized and decentralized production. In the onshore production scenario you see that the electricity from your wind farm is transmitted with an hvdc cable to an onshore electrolyzer and that's where you produce. Whereas in the offshore centralized scenario you would transmit the electricity to an offshore platform and that's where you would have your your electrolysis plant and then you would transmit to shore with a dedicated hydrogen pipeline. In the decentralized scenario however you would have your electrolysis plant in each of your wind turbine platforms and then your hydrogen would converge in a centralized compression station and from there you would pipe to to the shore. What we found was that over the entire range of chosen wind farm sizes so we had capacities from 100 megawatts to 2000 megawatts. Centralized offshore production yielded the lowest lcoh but after 800 megawatts the difference started to decrease significantly. One important note here is that the level that we found that the levelized cost of hydrogen was highly dependent on the levelized cost of electricity which as you will see in the brief we took an average for offshore wind in 2022 but that has already risen and it might stay high for some time. So the idea here is more to have a relative comparison within the methods and not an absolute measure since we are not trying here to predict what the cost of hydrogen is going to be in the future. We also saw that the benefit of modularity was not really captured by this methodology as we couldn't really account for the benefits of having a modular build up. So for that one of our suggestions for future work would be to try to capture that benefit through a different kind of analysis which could be perhaps an at present value analysis where you would consider cash flows over the lifetime of the project and for the specific case of hydrogen we also want to underscore that it's not only important to consider how much will it cost but how necessary is it going to be in each case. So it's important to consider local realities and local demands and if for example your region calls for more electricity than hydrogen then that might not be the way to go but however if you have a lot of heavy industry that you need to decarbonize then that perhaps makes the case for hydrogen more attractive. And as for the future outlook of M4s we think that the development of clear frameworks that ensure simple permitting procedures and effectively manage how the space will be shared between different users is going to be critical and additionally many of these projects are going to be built at large scales and as I mentioned they will need very large investments so perhaps considering economic incentives will be useful to accelerate the development of key technologies and to ensure that they reach higher technology readiness levels. Another recommendation that we can perhaps make is that of including multi-use as part of the non-price criteria when you're ranking offshore wind bits since we saw that offshore wind is the main driving factor behind this kind of project. And finally we think that local priorities should take center stage when we are evaluating these projects so perhaps it would be useful to use methodologies that not only account for the economic benefits but also for benefits outside of that so looking at perhaps the impact of job creation or let's say biodiversity preservation so really looking at the local impacts. So I hope this summarizes the results of our work well enough and you are all welcome of course to check out the brief. Thank you so much Guido and Maria. This was a great presentation of course I'm biased before we move on I actually have a question you mentioned that there is a lack of demonstration projects do you have an example where multi-use has been implemented? Yeah actually if we want to look at it from also from a point of view of it having been implemented from from an institutional side you see it in the there's a very good example in the Netherlands where this was applied in the Borsle wind farm zone and there they implemented this policy that they call area passports so they took the space within the wind turbines and they assigned it to different uses and they assigned it to passive fisheries to renewable energy generation also for R&D activities so that was pretty interesting of course there you might run the risk of the government assigning these spaces arbitrarily so saying okay here you're gonna have floating solar but if you don't need it or if it's not ready yet then that might cause some issues but it's a pretty interesting case. Thank you Guido I think this is a good segue into the following points in the agenda I would like to introduce our next speaker and if I could get a new slide over there. So our next speaker is Celine Frank Celine Europe Policy Officer the EU Commission DJ Mare and in your job you follow the topics offshore energy and policy development around multi-use and I think you will be talking about what is happening in Europe and the EU when it comes to multi-use multi-purpose platforms the floor is yours. Exactly thank you Karina and thanks a lot also for the presentation Guido and Maria and for your job on this I think it's really helpful to have this kind of review of what's happening with also a forward-looking perspective on what's coming next. What I can say is that in the past few years multi-use became really in our view essential in the European seas especially in certain areas that are already very crowded like areas from the North Sea also with the Green Deal and now we have big objectives for offshore renewable energy at sea but we also have big objectives for nature protection and so this all needs space and so I work in the team in DJ Mare that deals with the maritime spatial planning directive so that's what we do together with Member State is trying to find space for the different activities happening at sea and to really plan it ahead to have this view up to 10 years from now what's going to happen in the seas and what each country is going to do in coordination with the other countries that share this marine space so there is focus on each sea basin in Europe and trying to make all these uses coherence between each other and so that has been accelerated this need formal to use with our increased objective both at EU and at Member State level so what I can say is that maybe it's something we tend to forget but the biggest multi-use that will happen in the seas is nature protection or restoration and offshore renewables because we have both in the Green Deals these two priorities and these two will take a lot of space currently what we observe in terms of multi-use mostly it's not that I would say it's more local projects you can think of fisheries and tourism aquaculture you have already many activities that happens together but most mostly at the local small scale level now what we're going to see it's really a bigger scale especially with the different the developments of offshore wind farms and yeah this this will lead to different kind of multi-use like the one you investigated with hydrogen so for that we have indeed a lot of research projects ongoing notably funded with Horizon Europe and as you mentioned these are not yet for most of them really mature and sustainable in the sense that they can stay and be profitable for all activities involved but we're getting closer to there and we've seen that these projects yeah they've been running for some years and then continuing and evolving really towards so I think we're all getting close to that stage where also for example aquaculture in offshore wind farm areas is becoming profitable it's still yeah it's looking at a certain part of the market not all of it and still has other issues with competitions and then things like that but we see really good progress in there I wanted to mention as well the wind package that we published in October last year which actually has also mentioned multi-use and the fact that the European Commission is committed to work with member states to include areas specific for multi-use also in the maritime spatial plans that I mentioned before which are done at national level and I think Guido mentioned a good example from the Netherlands we see that it starts happening also in other countries in Belgium in Germany France so yeah I think member states understood the value of these multi-use projects now we also see that in the non-price criteria that are being developed by member states when they do an auction for offshore wind and most of these auctions now include those criteria that can be linked to as I said nature protection but also multi-use so also they need to keep space for combining with other activities other energy activities so yeah can be a wave can be also solar we have good project also with solar into offshore and farm areas that are developing so all of this together it puts actually the good environments for developing better this sector and yeah so I can I can still say that the Commission is very supportive on that we also on our side are working on this reviewing a bit what's happening in terms of multi-use and we have a msp platform online websites where we put all the information on maritime spatial planning but also there on multi-use projects and we are now trying to really have this compilation and easy access so anybody can see okay what type of multi-use is actually happening um in in european sea so that's yeah something uh that's coming up in the in the in the months to come and and will be developed uh in the next years so thank you thank you selen this is super interesting information I'm taking notes myself here for myself uh I have a bunch of questions but I'm not supposed to ask too many questions but I think I have a bit of space to ask you just one and I'm wondering you don't mention that the selection of sites and and kind of pose a question on on how this is being done it's a bit unclear whether it's based on the potential for electricity production or other criteria in in your opinion what is informing the selection of multi-use sites in the countries that have made progress I think so far yeah if we look at offshore wind for example so far yeah it's it's been led mostly by uh looking at where which are the areas with most potential for offshore wind and then multi-use comes afterwards like is okay what can we do in these areas that's that we plan to to have wind farms that's been how we do how it's been working mostly so far uh but yeah now there are also talks of okay let's look also ahead with the different actors and not only the offshore wind developers but also let's let's talk ahead in the maritime spatial planning process to include also potential aquaculture farmers and and see if these sites are actually good for them as well and yeah another driver I think is the environmental impact assessment that all projects have to do and before that and that's why maritime spatial planning is also useful there is a strategic environmental assessment that happens at the level of the whole plan for each country so in there there is also attention given to the environment but also impact on non-local communities and things like that and there is a big stakeholder consultation so I think yeah that's an added value to uh being able to look at the larger scale first and what will happen where in discussion with all the stakeholders involved so after that looking more in the details and in fact what you see in the maritime spatial plans there are usually larger areas that the projects themselves what where they're going to be so membership yeah plan like big buffer areas for each activities like looking at the where it would be best located but then what is developed is again re-discussed and also through the environmental impact assessment then refined thank you so much for working us through those steps we will have time for more questions later on and for you listening please post your questions in the Q&A thank you Celine I love your maps by the way I suspect there's some marine spatial planning going on there in the background definitely thank you thank you so much I will now introduce the next two speakers joining us from Orsted we have Mania Meister my name you're a lead business developer innovation and Alessandro Tampieri you are also a business developer innovation and project manager at at Orsted and I think you guys will describe the current situation probably talk a bit more about what you think and where you think the industry is heading towards and the floor is yours welcome thank you so much and I think we might have a slight possibly preparing in the background but while we get that up and running thank you so much for having us and thank you for the really good introductions to this really interesting subject matter I think it's I think as everyone has been saying it's very timely it's a good opportunity to discuss this because there are so many different opportunities so I think we're going to try and Alessandro and I to to take a step back and and really give you that developer perspective of of what does it mean to to take stuff offshore and offshore wind has been mentioned a lot of time it's kind of the cornerstone here so yeah bear with us as we probably will repeat some of the things that's already been said but very happy to be here so hope it's Alessandro thanks and nice to meet you all I think it's a good sign that some things are repeated because it means we are all on the same page and I just wanted to briefly start from this illustration of an offshore wind farm from the top because it really shows where the opportunity just practically starts from which is how much space is actually available in between the wind turbines of offshore wind farms so if we were to fill that space up with combining different technologies together we can really see and get a sense of how the energy production can substantially increase per square kilometers because you can include an offshore solar system or several wave energy converters and that would really boost the production of a wind farm while also leveraging on the production complementarity of for example a wind and solar and all of this would be done not with a let's say one plus one infrastructure deployment or O&M regime but there could be many synergies depending of course on the technologies that is developed in for example increasing the efficiency of the export cable or using crew and vessels in synergy for different technologies together but of course all of these opportunities come with challenges and let's say the common denominator between the technologies we've mentioned so far are certainly that they are all very early stage and that they have to be deployed offshore which is a big challenge by itself because it challenges installation O&M and also the survivability of the technology itself so these all substantially increase the costs as also mentioned before especially from a Capex point of view which then influences the business cases and make it very challenging at times to make projects actually work out and the immaturity of technologies themselves also create other challenges first of all as mentioned before the lack of permitting procedures and regulatory frameworks which really slow down the deployment of projects because there is no clarity and no guidelines on how to actually approach them so this will lead to what we believe are some of the things that have to happen and I will head it back to Manja. Yeah exactly and I think from now regulatory and permitting has been mentioned a few times I think we've also all noted that Netherlands is definitely maybe a step ahead in terms of making this a strategic focus I think across all of these different opportunities that we see for co-use and co-location that is certainly one I think it's also important that we take a step back and look at these opportunities a bit more in isolation and so I've tried here to really group them into whether they are upstream midstream or downstream or biodiversity which I think in many ways are quite a different place so to speak so are we are we adding additional generation resources you know such as offshore solar wave energy are we adding storage and conversion technologies could be batteries could be any sort of power to x or are we adding power demand out there so are we hooking up to a nearby oil and gas platform sorry if our sound is a bit strange and aquaculture is another one where we're simply seeing that we're adding the power demand behind the meter out on shore on offshore sorry and and then of course we have the whole biodiversity agenda which also makes use of the same space but it's a quite different plane and we're really trying to say fix a challenge that the presence of offshore wind might have created to begin with so I think it's important to say that certainly some of the next steps for all of these are the same we do need to see more ambitions from from governments whether you know local or country levels we need to to see a strategic focus here but I think as we move closer to maybe the consumption side we will also have to see a willingness to pay and a willingness to innovate from the off takers themselves so that could be a big tech it could be big industrials in one way or another who who need to think about the type of footprint they have and what they need so obviously as you go offshore it does call for more automation and remote and monitoring remote operations and that's of course not something we can do from one day to the other so so that's where the jobs of Alessandra and myself and innovation that's the type of conversation that we love to have which is basically how do we enable this in the future so I think that was our very brief five minutes happy to to further elaborate thank you so much uh Alessandra and Vania Mania sorry that sounds very interesting and indeed you you guys are essentially talking along the same terms that the previous speakers are referring to except from the private sector angle I have a question before we get into the q&a Earthset operates in different geographies if I understand correctly do you have a market or a location where you feel things are running faster when it comes to multi-use and why is that yeah I think we could definitely echo that we see more of an interest in in Europe and definitely as mentioned Netherlands is a good example where things are just a bit more straightforward if we were to develop within our own wind farms there would be a process for which we could do it I would also say Europe in a similar vein as to how we got into offshore wind back in the days we are just more land constraints than say the US or the Americas in many ways but we are also starting to see a lot of push in the Asia-Pacific maybe more so on on the the biodiversity agenda but generally of course we are also seeing land constrained countries with with a rapid growth of power consumption and a need for decarbonization as well so I think we will see it almost take a similar trajectory as offshore wind did a few decades ago at least that's how it's looking right now thank you so much Alessandro this was very interesting I would like to now ask all the previous speakers to please open your cameras Karina you are muted thank you now I don't know how much you heard but we're going into the Q&A and before that I would like to clarify a comment I believe my colleagues did that already in the chat but still I think it's worth mentioning indeed it's not energy production it's electricity production energy cannot be produced as as one of our listeners rightly pointed out so there's a question to Orsted here would it not help offshore wind power if the official eco labels for example Nordic eco label blue Engel EU eco label etc demanded that their licenses had to buy green power that means power with guarantees of origin from renewable power generation and I'll ask you to feel free to answer but keep in mind the time go ahead yes if I understand the question correctly it's about I guess pushing demands to want to be green and I think we are seeing that to a very high extent I will at the same time say that you can offtake a fully green electricity without being located offshore I think it's important that we keep in mind why we want to place certain things offshore so definitely I think you'll never hear us say that we don't think it's a great idea to to push for more green electricity demand but that in itself is usually not enough of a driver to to to look at co-location and in co-use of the space thank you I'm gonna now read two questions one address for to Celine and the other one to Guido so Celine how is the EU commission working on combining marine spatial planning with the policy and legislation needed to provide the incentives for getting this going and I will immediately pose a question to Guido as well Guido think for the presentation you mentioned the need for economic incentives to spur technological development do you have a sense of the scale on types of incentives needed here and please Celine go ahead I start yeah sorry for the light it suddenly got very sunny here in Brussels so it's but yeah you see half of my face yeah so I only mentioned earlier one policy paper that deals with multi-use and says it's something the commission is going to work out on with member state but actually it's been some years that pretty much in every paper related to the green deal that touches on on maritime things or marine space we've been repeating that that's multi-use is the way to go there is a places where marine space is already getting scarce obviously for renewable energy everybody is now looking at sea as the land is very crowded and then we know that there are opportunities there so yeah we all we can already know in advance that some places will get very crowded and then that multi-use will gets very useful if we want to achieve all our objectives so already in 2020 when we published a communication on the sustainable blue economy we mentioned the need to push for for multi-use and I can say also that in term of research funding for that it has only increased in the last in the past years because we see opportunities there we see projects that's work they just need the little push more to reach the commercial phase in in in most places and and yeah there is a cool call also to to look a bit more ahead and not just look at the existing wind farm and add things there but at the design before starting to build them with the help of as I mentioned the non-price criteria to make that coordinated approach from the different stakeholders that take parts and have the opportunity to to look at how to better also design these farms there are a lot of talks also with the fisheries sectors need some space in the sea and how we can design those farm to let them pass through because these wind farms are getting bigger and we need also space for for fishers to pass through and around good news is that's when they are there after sometimes usually we see the fish coming around and some some reef effect happening in these areas so sometimes more opportunities as well are created that's why I mentioned also the the importance of the nature protection and energy yeah not production but electricity production let's see then to to put these things together so yeah I will stop there thanks and yeah and for the question that the Emil posed a sense of the scale of incentives I would say it's it's pretty hard to to give you a number but in terms of the types of incentives I would say any anything resembling grants for research and development is I think would be very useful especially at the stages when when companies are already starting to to do tests offshore because that that's where I think their costs really start to skyrocket so really targeting it to to where they're needed the most and and yeah targeting them also to the companies where you know this is going to be deployed in in a multi-use context and if I may add here when we're talking about these concepts the part where the multi-use comes in is the the one that's most vulnerable at the moment as we all discussed since offshore wind is driving that transition you have to maybe target some of the incentives to be on the side of aquaculture or the hydrogen production or anything else that is the combination technology so that there is actual actual interest and new actors coming in to to to fill the the security of having this support essentially of doing multi-use instead of doing mono-use let's say thanks Maria I have actually a few questions for you but before that I'm gonna actually corner Alessandra and Manja if because we're talking about incentives what kind of incentives do you want to have what kind of incentives do you need to to be able to think multi instead of single do you guys have thought about it yeah definitely I think I think it's like it's a good point of saying it has to be quite targeted to what are we trying to achieve so I think it's it's worth mentioning as we've said a few times that the lce for a lot of these say co-generation or or supportive generation they are just you know we're talking three four five times what offshore wind is today so for for things to happen we need to we don't have to have a perfect business case from day one but we need to see that this can and see the cost out that we would need we also need to de-risk it at some at some level right so if we look at wave if we look at offshore solar there's still challenges around survivability and we are targeting some of these very tough areas so the North Sea is is you know and not a friendly place to add anything and so I think it's very important to to basically send the right signals to developers such as ourselves that we understand and that you cannot bear the entire risk here so part of that could be simply a capex infusion in one way or another to really make sure that that our investment is not completely sunk in case the worst things should happen or cause the skyrocket as we're developing thank you and now I'm actually back to you Maria I what did you in the literature that you that you conducted I'm wondering whether you saw any regional differences in the times in the types of m4 projects that that you found and perhaps whether you can also complement your answer whether you in your interview so any differences in the types of projects yes so the the type of renewable energy source that is available defined the projects we saw quite a lot so in the North Sea region in Europe for example it's a lot of wind since the potential is very high if we go towards the equator so we are discussing in the floating PV panels combined with other kinds of uses so since energy is driving that part then I would say it depends a little bit on the potential available what kind of solutions we see another thing that it's interesting is that and I mentioned that earlier is that we capture a lot of English literature and there is a lot of literature available for the European region since we have a very strong R&D projects producing results when we look at literature as I said not what's happening when it comes to implementation but there are indications that there are different ways to approach these projects around the world but we would definitely like to see more of for example in Asia having more modular and smaller scale multifunctional platforms that are used to provide services to different smaller communities that are under a vulnerable situation when it comes to energy or water provision for example we do not have a lot of literature for those cases unfortunately only some indications but it would be another interesting aspect to explore and it might be even worth discussing at the European context and related to resilience and climate adaptation in the future. Thanks Peria. Guido is there anything you would like to add before I move on to my last question to Celine? Not really what we found on the when we were looking at commercially focused projects was along the same lines so it was mainly driven by what kind of energy source you would have and then it was going from there. Maybe I address the question slightly different to to Celine why the focus on large-scale projects I think you mentioned as well when you were speaking is there are there any opportunities as Maria brings up for smaller scale perhaps even making their deployment faster than larger scale projects and what are the pros and cons and perhaps the second question as well completely different you mentioned environmental impact assessments and strategic assessments to what extent are these considering the impacts the cumulative impacts versus the impacts from single use for single projects as well as the cumulative impacts at the regional level not just nationally so two questions for you. Okay so I will start with the small versus big question. Yeah indeed I think the scale has been driven by offshore wind mainly which it's quite a big scale usually it's yeah we we talk about very big projects big turbines in the water much bigger than what we see on land so that's why these are by default big projects but there are other types of multi-use as I mentioned that have been existing for actually a lot of time if we think about fisheries together with tourism there's a lot of time that this happens it's really small scale usually small projects but we see that happening a lot in the Mediterranean for example with the concept of pescatourism so they are really already in the EU example of small scale not that much with offshore wind because it's big by default but yeah when we work with very different scale in there because for example aquaculture is a rather small scale sector usually that's then will take really small parts in the offshore wind area so yeah we have to deal with these different scales different capacities also financial capacity investments and so but it's possible to combine combine these different scales together and yes maybe we need to also highlight and work more with those small local scales project as well because they are there and they are important then yeah to go back on the environmental question and cumulative impact yeah it's another word that comes back more and more in the discussions because increasing the number of activities obviously increase the impacts all this falls under the marine strategy framework directive which actually the approach of it is reaching good even environmental status for the whole seas and how to do that is by putting thresholds and there are different criteria for which we are still developing thresholds some are there already we have done for example on plastic we are there on order if we think about for example noise at sea we are still working on it but we have these thresholds that are there they just need to be implemented now and that's the tricky part so these would apply to all sector and that's that's why we need this coordinated approach and for that yeah you mentioned that's cumulative impacts have to be looked also at the level of sea basin or yeah collaboration between different member states and for that we have systems in place we have regional sea conventions for example in each sea basins that look at these environmental aspects and how to integrate them and in the different policies at yeah national and EU level so they also advise us also for energy production and we have some transnational or a sea basin level organization like the North Sea Energy Corporation which also looks at maritime spatial planning of aspects environmental aspects how to integrate that in in those those new developments so yes certainly something we're working more and more on with member states cumulative impacts something also that we want to integrate in the planning of course because yeah once you know what is coming you can assess what will be the impacts of all the activities together and see okay where it's becoming critical and where maybe we need to decrease activity or or see where to redirect certain activities and yeah I saw something in the chat like why why considering that we need to go more at sea where yeah it's true it's it needs to go and in hands in hands with what we do on land there is a lot to do on land both in terms of yeah energy and and what we can do to save energy isolate better the houses and and yeah put solar panels all these things have to be done in parallel also decreasing the pollution that come from the lands to the sea so yeah it's all connected but there are good reasons to go to go to sea to produce energy yeah we know it like in terms of winds there is much more so there are there are really good reasons economical and rational to to go at sea while continuing to do all this monitoring because yeah speaking about solar offshore solar it's really the beginning of it it's gonna start to expand slowly but yeah there have been a lot of studies before on the impacts and the studies are continuing Netherlands leading and yeah there is a lot of research on that as well that that is happening before it really expanded to a larger scale thanks thank you so much Celine I think this is a very good way to wrap up today's seminar as I'm aware there's a lot going on and we expect a lot more knowledge being produced in the coming years as well as hopefully companies making progress and and and data being collected to monitor potential impacts but also the opportunities where where are the gains to be made in terms of not just the economy but also in terms of reducing impacts by increasing the efficiency of what we do in our seas you mentioned Celine the maritime special platform feel free to to put the the link in the chat if you want I found I found it extremely useful and a good way to synthesize all the projects going on in Europe I should also say that our research continues what we present my colleagues presented here today is is really just a taste of what's going on feel free to reach out to any of us to learn more of what what's happening in terms of multifunctional and the development of multifunctional offshore solutions I would like to thank our speakers today for making the time to to be with us in this seminar and share your insights and I would of course like to take the thank the participants for making it reach out to us reach out to the speakers and yeah see you at a different point thank you bye bye thank you