ENCORE aimed to enhance innovation delivery within the Offshore Renewable Energy (ORE) sector, focusing on two key objectives. Firstly, it sought to advance four ORE technologies through a structured and collaborative process, addressing common challenges via Taskforces. This involved elevating the Water2Energy river current turbine, Teamwork Technology wave energy device, Oceans of Energy offshore solar plant, and EEL Energy undulating water current turbine from TRL 3 to 5.

Secondly, ENCORE aimed to formulate a Route-to-Market strategy for ORE solutions, expediting their commercialisation in areas such as islands, harbours, estuaries, and offshore structures. The strategy encompassed several sub-objectives, including preparing SMEs for investment, continual enhancement of international standards and certification, fostering skills development in the Blue Economy, and active involvement of the supply chain and stakeholders.

By pursuing these objectives, ENCORE aspired to significantly contribute to the growth and advancement of the Offshore Renewable Energy sector, fostering technological progress, commercial viability, and sustainable development in related industries.

The main outputs of the ENCORE project are:

● 4 SMEs benefitting from collaboration with Service Providers (SPs) to develop 4 next-generation prototypes of advanced innovations of integrated Offshore Renewables Energy solutions for island, estuaries, offshore wind parks and platforms.

Each SME directly benefits in terms of technology readiness (from TRL 3 - 7) and commercial readiness resulting in an expected €100 mln capital raising and identification of 10 new deployment opportunities. Services to support the 4 SMEs have been developed and provided by engineering consultancies and Test Laboratories (TLs). These SPs benefitted from market uptake and 30 new SMEs are expected to be supported by the SPs in 3 years after the project closure;

● a Route-to-market strategy for ORE solutions in the 2 Seas area and beyond (international export). This output captures all learnings from the business plans, robust certification, educational tools and stakeholder engagement to create long-term impact.

The output is expected to provide a clear and usable Route-to-market  thus ensuring growth & jobs and giving authorities data to underpin policy development.

Check the “Outputs” section below to download related material and see “Main Achievements” section for further information about the achieved results.

Transnational cooperation between technology developers (TDs), supply chain, regulators, Test laboratories (TLs), and R&D institutes is paramount for commercialising ORE for export across the world, for local job creation and attracting investors. The 2 Seas area is blessed with abundant wind, solar, wave and river current resources, thus allowing cross-border export of know-how and solutions. Regions should cooperate on strengthening and engaging regional supply chains, developing joint policies for support and learn from commercial experience in oil and gas, water management, harbour management and offshore wind. ENCORE implemented a Regional Impact Campaign where partners, observers and other stakeholders jointly work on activities and common challenges through engaging with education for cross-border training, with supply chain through sub-contracting and organising events, regulators through meetings, and with stakeholders through social media, press releases, and newsletters.

In fact, the Ocean Energy Sector mainly focuses on the development and improvement of individual technologies. The project achieved greater results by collaborating and sharing knowledge between technology developers (TDs) and service providers (SPs) such as Engineering consultancies, Certification Bodies and Test Labs. Furthermore, ENCORE-2 focused not solely on the technology development, but developed integrated solutions for specific areas. Collaboration and development of these integrated solutions required a diverse partnership. To efficiently develop ORE, it was imperative to combine lessons learned from island regions around NL and UK, with coastal projects from Belgium and France and from offshore wind farms throughout the 2 Seas area. The activities in ENCORE tackled joint challenges by pooling expertise and building lasting links between businesses and institutions throughout 2 Seas. The coordinated involvement of many observers and other stakeholders across the 2 Seas area increased the long-term durability of the project outputs.