RISK-BASED APPROACH FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF GUIDELINES AND STANDARDS ON COMBINED MARINE RENEWABLE ENERGY PLATFORMS

The combination of Marine Renewable Energy (MIRE) technologies such as wave or current devices with offshore wind, a more mature technology, could enable pooling of R&D efforts and reducing costs (grid connection, moorings, maintenance activities ...). Moreover, the different characteristics of the wind, wave and current resources could be complementary and provide a smoothing effect on the power production. Therefore, the EU FP7 project -MARINA Platformaims at studying concepts of combined platforms integrating different types of MIRE devices. Many challenges are induced by these innovative platforms and guidelines and standards will be required to ensure safety, reliability and quality. However, as the concepts are only at the development stage, no standards have been written for these combined platforms so far. This paper presents a new approach proposed by Bureau Veritas within the scope of the MARINA project for the development of guidelines and standards dedicated to combined MRE platforms. Existing literature on standards about MIRE and related sectors, like shipping, wind energy and offshore oil & gas, forms a good basis to be exploited. In addition, risk assessment and qualification of new technology might be considered as a complement to standards to support the design of novel offshore concepts. Therefore, the presented methodology combines the use of existing standards from MRE and related sectors with a risk-based approach for the most innovative and unknown parts of the platform. A global risk assessment is performed in parallel for a whole review of the system.