Presenting UNITED and it’s Pilot at the WindEUROPE Conference in Copenhagen 2021

 
December 2021 

This year Dr. Tim Staufenberger (marine biologist and CEO of Kiel Marine Farm) of the German Pilot team

travelled to the WindEUROPE conference in Copenhagen to present the UNITED project at an offshore multi-use session, organized by the Offshore Coalition for Energy and Nature (OCeaN). 

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“It was a very lively discussion round and people seemed very much interested in and taken by the idea of multi-use and the huge potential it bears, regarding carbon sequestration, renewable energy production,sustainable tourism and ecologicalviable aquaculture production,” Dr. Staufenberger reported smiling.


The session was dedicated to sharing experiences, opportunities, and limitations of multi-use in marine spatial planning. A key point of discussion was how multi-use in the EU policy will be supported and how EU policies aim to promote the rollout of multi-use approaches. Among the speakers and audience were important representatives from DG Mare, such as Xavier Guillou (Policy Officer, DG Mare) and the offshore wind industry, represented by Ulrik Stridbæk (Vice President, Head of Regulatory Affairs, Ørsted). Panellists debated heatedly over the uncertainties and missing pieces of a wide ranging uptake of multi-use approaches and the main obstacles from a policy perspective.
Together with his UNITED colleagues Ioanna Drigkopoulou (Associate, Wings ICT Solutions) and Hans Christian Sørensen (Project Manager, Middelgrunden) Dr. Staufenberger shared his experiences on how to go from idea to practice, what key challenges and barriers they all had to tackle and how they considered the environmental impact of multi-use at their sites.

Due to the intensive debate about marine multi-use, the UNITED team handed in a full paper to the proceedings of the WindEurope journal, sharing the many aspects and experiences made during the course of the project, when implementing multi-use pilot sites.

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