The future of marine renewables in Croatia

Marine renewable energies are “trendy”. Since the European Union defined its goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase the share of renewable energy and energy efficiency by 2030, the future of blue energy has been on the table.

With the purpose of helping to achieve these objectives, the BLUE DEAL project is carrying out a series of Transferrings Lab in which the current situation of Marine Renewable Energies, the different technologies available and their possibilities of implementation are analyzed. In this case, all this analysis has been carried out on the future of these technologies in the Croatian area and specifically in Split-Dalmatia County. The event was organized by project partner Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and Naval Architecture, University of Zagreb.

Over 4 days, 30 speakers specialized in the sector and more than 200 people from 12 countries have participated, both online and physically, in this hybrid event.

On the first day, the presentations focused on the current conditions in Croatia to carry out the energy transition to increase the use of renewable sources, such as marine energy in this case. The effort and the actions that are being carried out to ensure greater deployment of RES sources in a sustainable manner and mainly in the development of the offshore wind was evident.

Martin Bućan from Split-Dalmatia County highlighted the importance of preserving the environment and ecosystem and shown that it is “crucial to make bigger moves in household sectors”, which is also an investment opportunity. In this sense, Alessandra Sensi, Union for the Mediterranean, also highlighted that "it’s necessary to ensure comprehensive development of the all economic actions for MED area"

During the second day, the analysis of the different sources and technologies that could be installed after analyzing the potential of the area was focused more, taking into account the challenges it poses due to the existence of Posidonia and the navigation routes that delimit the possible pilot areas. Professor Goran Krajačić commented that “Croatia has a local sustainable action plans and Act for Smart islands”. Likewise, the investigation of the different devices revealed the potential of wave energy and offshore wind turbines as well as the possibility of creating a hybrid BE platform to take advantage of the different resources. “Offshore wind potential shows great perspective to achieve energy independence and increase the share of renewables. Split-Dalmatia County could lead the Croatian BE sector. " Hrvoje Stančin - UNIZAG FSB.

Throughout this session, the 3-dimensional visualization tool developed by the project partner Geo Imaging drew special attention, which allows, interacting with it, to see how the coastline of the coast would look if the different types of devices were implanted.

As part of the strategy to promote this type of energy, BLUE DEAL presented on the third day a series of 12 Open Innovation Challenges that seek to promote the efficient matching of demand and supply of innovation and knowledge-based services in the Blue Energy sector. Companies that wish to present their solutions to these challenges may do so through the platform https://bluedealmed.eu/.

In addition, throughout the day some pilot projects and practical cases were also presented that showed the success obtained after the implementation of these technologies.

Blue energy is the future of renewable energy and that is why it is important to train new generations. For this reason, the last day of the event has been entirely dedicated to working with different schools and public authorities responsible for education system to introduce Blue Deal School Contest to them and arrange further cooperation. Therefore, several bilateral meetings were held with an aim to organize the contest in the selected pilot areas. Moreover, on these meeting it was agreed how the actual school visit will work due to epidemiological measures and GDPR obligations.

This event was co-organized by the Interreg MED BLUE DEAL Modular Project and the BLUE GROWTH Horizontal Project. 

 

BLUE DEAL is a European project made up of 12 partners from 6 Mediterranean countries and co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund and the Instrument for the Pre-accession Assistance Fund, with a budget of 2.8 million euros.