When the RSPB launched its Energy Futures report in 2016, we offered a vision for how we could tackle climate change by driving the much needed energy revolution in harmony with nature. 

We demonstrated that it was possible to generate up to four times the UK’s current energy consumption through low ecological risk renewables.  What’s more, we offered three scenarios as to how this could be achieved including what we called “a high marine renewables scenario”, which assumed that there was strong progress in the development of offshore technologies such as floating wind turbines, wave and tidal power.

The publication of the UK Government’s new Sector Deal for offshore wind brings this challenge into stark relief given the with the sector - already the world’s largest at 8GW - set to triple in size by 2030. While many are reviewing the next round of offshore wind projects, we are keen to focus minds on the exciting opportunity offered by floating wind turbines. A short report (image below and PDF at the bottom of this blog) just launched by the RSPB describes how a shift to floating offshore wind technology could be one way to significantly reduce the harm offshore wind causes to seabirds.  

Let me explain.

I can’t recall an industry that has expanded at such a vast scale in so short a timeframe. This is a huge economic and low carbon success story but it’s not all good news.

Offshore wind may be largely out of sight, out of mind, but current evidence points to the severe risks that turbines pose to our marine wildlife and as more and more turbines are deployed, these risks mount up to an unprecedented scale. On this basis, how we deploy large numbers of offshore turbines in harmony with our natural marine environment is likely to be one of the marine conservation challenges for society over the coming decades.

So what are these risks and why are they so damaging? The UK seas and coasts are home to millions of seabirds that come here to breed and overwinter – species Northern gannet, kittiwake and puffin.  Being highly mobile and spending most of their lives at sea means seabirds will interact with and be impacted by large offshore turbine arrays.  Individual birds may no longer be able to feed in their favoured feeding grounds which in turn means they could lose weight and not be fit enough to breed successfully or survive the winter months, whilst collisions with moving turbine blades, with tip speeds that are in excess of 150mph, is often fatal.

Fabulous image of a gannet by Ben Andrew (rspb-images.com)

With 2,000 turbines already in operation in UK waters, the cumulative effect is substantial.  Current evidence suggests it could mean some seabird species will see their national populations significantly reduced over the next 15-20 years.

Of course, these relatively new impacts are in addition to many existing impacts on the marine environment caused by long-term human activities such as fishing or pollution.  A particular irony is also that one of the biggest pressures on many seabird species is likely to be the effects of temperature increases caused by climate change, which is rapidly altering the delicate balances that support life in the oceans and the birds above them. 

As seabirds can move huge distances between breeding and wintering grounds, they will also interact with offshore wind projects in other countries. For example, each neighbouring North Sea country has similar ambitions for offshore wind as those of the UK. Collectively these ambitions amount to 180-200GW of offshore wind across the entire North Sea by 2050, equivalent to roughly double the UK’s current total generating capacity, including gas, coal and nuclear.

It is clear that immediate action is needed to avoid the already huge risks posed on our seabirds, especially if the sector is to continue to expand into the future.  Otherwise we face creating a wholly new environmental disaster, whilst trying to avert the impacts of climate change.

This is why we were encouraged to see the content of the Offshore Wind Sector Deal announced earlier this month. The Deal is an expression of the UK Government’s partnership with the sector, aimed to maximise the opportunity it brings to achieve the clean growth element of the Industrial Strategy. Although it is just a start, the deal made it clear that offshore wind cannot continue to simply cause increasingly severe impacts on seabirds while exploiting nature’s wind resources.  The RSPB, working with our colleagues particularly in the Wildlife Trusts, are already working to help ensure offshore wind happens in a way that delivers the least harm and the most benefit for our fantastic seabirds and other marine wildlife.

We think floating wind could offer a different future.  It could help move offshore wind toward deeper water and further offshore locations. In principle these deeper, far-offshore sites are likely to have fewer environmental sensitivities, distant from the shallow water, nearshore sites favoured by seabirds for feeding

There’s no one easy solution that will adequately protect our seabirds and other marine wildlife whilst also delivering the renewable energy we desperately need. Rather a suite of measures will be needed to tackle this huge national and wider North Sea scale issue. However, it is clear that as a world leader in offshore wind, the UK must seize the opportunity to address these fundamental and strategic issues as the sector works towards achieving their ambitions for 2030 and beyond.

7658.46823RSPB Deep water renewables booklet AW web.pdf