Adaptive Management

Adaptive Management

The permitting process for marine renewable energy (MRE) projects is still evolving, and it can be challenging to apply existing consenting processes to a relatively new industry. To overcome these challenges, scientists, state and federal regulators, and technology developers around the world are working together to understand the potential interactions of MRE turbines with the marine environment and creating new knowledge and tools for decision-making.

To address this challenge ORPC has developed and implemented an adaptive management approach designed to utilize our environmental monitoring results along with studies from other MRE projects and related work worldwide. An adaptive management team, consisting of federal and state regulators and technical advisors, has guided monitoring and licensing requirements for ORPC’s Federal Energy Regulatory Commission licensed site since 2012. In collaboration with the adaptive management team, we have confidently demonstrated that monitoring can be adjusted proportionally to a project’s measured risk to the environment. In doing so, we have established a model that has garnered global interest.