COMPASS · Comprehensive Offshore Management Platform for Assessing SuStainability

Europe is at the forefront of offshore wind energy, with ambitious goals to expand its capacity from around 34 GW in 2023 to at least 88 GW by 2030 and 360 GW by 2050. Developing Offshore Wind Farms (OWFs) affects the environment and socio-economic systems both positively and negatively. To meet sustainability requirements, it is crucial to holistically evaluate these impacts across all scales and life phases of existing and future OWFs. Although many modeling tools exist to assess different types of impacts individually, the development of a holistic integrated tool is lacking. COMPASS (Comprehensive Offshore Management Platform for Assessing Sustainability) will provide an innovative and holistic understanding of both global and local cumulative impacts of OWF. By combining life-cycle based environmental, economic and social tools and an OWF digital twin, COMPASS will leverage their mutual advantages to assess OWF project sustainability. These tools will be integrated in a user-friendly, customizable, decision-support platform. The platform will be set up using diverse case studies across Europe, incorporating various OWF designs from bottom-fixed to floating technologies. This approach ensures its adaptability to different European sea basins and OWF projects. The platform aims to assist stakeholders in exploring different cost-effective options to improve sustainability trade-offs, acceptability and performance of OWF projects. By addressing both priced and non-priced sustainability criteria, it will provide recommendations to optimize OWF designs, from recycling strategies to nature-inclusive solutions, thereby refining OWF tender competitiveness. The COMPASS consortium brings together leading experts from academia, research institutes and industry, across eight EU countries, and involves an End-User Group, Policy-oriented Advisory Board and international experts, ensuring an innovative transdisciplinary, end-user driven approach to OWF impact assessment.