Powering Prosperity – Ireland’s Offshore Wind Industrial Strategy
28 March 2024
European launch of Ireland’s first strategy at WindEurope, Bilbao
Flotation Energy were there to feel the excitement at Wind Europe Bilbao, 2024. The Flotation Energy team were part of the Irish Pavilion which was jointly run by industry and government.
We were delighted to witness the official European launch of Ireland’s first offshore wind industrial strategy.
The Strategy aims to build a successful and impactful offshore wind energy industry in Ireland, ensuring that the sector creates as much value as possible throughout Ireland and maximises the economic benefits associated with government ambitions to deliver its 2030, 2040 and 2050 offshore wind targets.
The Government has acknowledged the important role that floating offshore wind technology will play in delivering offshore energy at scale in the medium term. This Strategy will ready industry, and the research system to deliver on these goals, and to ensure Ireland meets its stated ambition of 2 GW of non-grid limited renewable energy capacity planned to be in development by 2030.
Government to establish an OWCE and a new Floating Offshore Wind Demonstrator to support growth and innovation.
Powering Prosperity, which includes 40 actions that will be implemented in 2024 and 2025, was developed as part of close ongoing collaboration between the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment and other government departments and agencies.
Flotation Energy supports the actions within the Strategy, in particular the action to ‘Investigate the feasibility of a floating offshore wind demonstrator site’. Flotation Energy believes an appropriately sized demonstrator site will allow us to engage with the supply chain and look at local value creation from an early stage. It takes time to build appropriate supply chain capacity. Flotation Energy has seen that countries that take a holistic view and are more interventionist in policy and financial mechanisms to support necessary pipelines will likely see the better local content benefit.
Floatation Energy supports the action to ‘establishment of an Offshore Wind Centre of Excellence (OWCE) to enable offshore wind supply chain companies in Ireland, government agencies and further and higher education institutions to access, adopt and accelerate new technologies, for example, in floating offshore wind and digital, that solve real world challenges and collaborate to drive the sector’s future competitiveness’. We at Flotation Energy believe that cross sector engagement will be crucial to workforce development. As an industry and as individual companies we need to be able to attract and keep the people we want. We are already mapping and developing transitional pathways to support the attraction and mobility of people from other engineering and technology sectors. A centre of excellence will bring together all interests to maximise local growth. A huge thanks to Wind Energy Ireland, Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications, Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage, Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment, and industrial colleagues for making the launch so memorable.
Read more on the strategy here Powering Prosperity_Ireland’s Offshore Wind Industrial Strategy (enterprise.gov.ie)
