Offshore wind in Australia – ensuring the industry is informed by the best available information

Declarations of priority offshore wind areas have been made off the coast of Victoria, NSW and WA, and developers are already working on planning and feasibility studies to seek licensing and regulatory approval. There are strict environmental laws to comply with, so it is vital that developers get the right environmental data first time, to mitigate delays or changes to plans.

Gathering a reliable baseline dataset

In our article ‘Getting it right first time: LiDAR for offshore wind developers’, we looked at the importance of a reliable baseline dataset for marine wildlife, especially in territories where there is a lack of historical data. In Australasian waters, there are many more species of birds and marine mammals than in Europe, as well as marine reptiles like turtles, so it is important to gather as much new information as possible. APEM Group is gathering robust and accurate data to inform mitigation measures, while bringing lessons learned and best practice from past projects around the world.

Combining best practice technology with an apportioning approach

APEM Group is committed to ensuring Australia makes the best start in the emerging offshore wind industry by collecting data in the best way possible. For the Star of the South wind farm project, the APEM Group marine wildlife team worked on surveys, data provision and reporting, and it is now recognised that this project was a leap forward in data collection by combining DAS (Digital Aerial Surveys) and LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging). APEM Group also utilised boat-based data to refine identification through an apportionment process that fed into the baseline data for collision risk modelling. This approach has been taken forward into other offshore renewables projects.

Australian waters are inhabited by a high diversity of seabird species, some of which are extremely difficult to identify from aerial images. Amongst others, these include some shearwaters, petrels and albatrosses. Boat-based surveys have better capacity to identify such birds to species-level. So, in cases where DAS records could not be identified to species level, the proportion of each species recorded by boat-based surveys was used to apportion the DAS data to individual species.

Regional and site-level identifications: developers and consultants working together

There are plans for large offshore wind projects sited close to each other. For ornithological collision risk modelling, site-based data is required on bird flight activity rates and flight density for each species. Utilising a range of data collection methods, including DAS, LiDAR and boat-based surveys, allows for cross validation to improve confidence about data from the various sources.

For the future, APEM Group encourages data-sharing between nearby projects as a means to improve collective understanding and to assist in the important aspect of cumulative impact assessment.

For offshore wind projects in Australia, there is no perfect data collection methodology. In a fast-growing industry, there is a need for an approach in which data from multiple sources is used to the best advantage and each contributes to an overall understanding of the potential for effects on birds and other environmental values.

LiDAR and the use of DAS are well established techniques for measuring rather than estimating. These best practice approaches, combined with close-range data collection methods including boat-based surveys in an apportioning approach, will build certainty and confidence in the Australian offshore wind industry for developers, government and state level regulators, conservation bodies, consultancies and the public.