Strengthening Ireland's offshore wind policy: A review of international practices in offshore wind governance

Abstract

Offshore wind energy (OWE) has significant potential to transform Ireland's energy market. Hence, Ireland has shifted its attention to expand offshore wind sector, particularly with the fixed offshore wind, which has demonstrated commercial readiness and can help achieve the climate goals. However, the technical design of offshore wind farm for decarbonizing the electricity system is typically governed by legal framework that covers the planning and permitting. Arguably, the planning permission remains the unique obstacle for offshore wind development (OWD). To support the OWD in Ireland, this review article aims to provide justifications for resolving these issues, particularly by streamlining the consenting process, while identifying the good practices among different nations. Therefore, PRISMA based methodology is incorporated in the article to select current state of policy and legal framework governing OWDs and it adopted 11 different countries as the case study. By unpacking the review, it is revealed that several policy amendments have been approved by the policy makers to promote the sustainable development of offshore wind projects. One conclusion of this study is that adoption of one-stop-shop procedure is a good practice to ease of legal barriers, as demonstrated in several case countries. Therefore, this study advises that restructuring planning permission can significantly reduce the complexity and promote innovation in OWD. Furthermore, based on the comparison made between different case-studies selected in this study, evidence supporting Project Design Envelope (allowance of design flexibility) approach has been noticed which is extremely important to support the future developments. This PDE approach has clear potential to shift the direction of Ireland's offshore wind industry.