The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) has published the statistics regarding renewable energy and the Oil & Gas strategic plan

 

The event schedule for the underwater noise workshop on Wednesday 27th February that is being jointly run by Baker Consultants Ltd and HR Wallingford has now been published.  On-line registration is now available for this event.

Baker Consultants and HR Wallingford are jointly hosting a workshop on underwater noise to be held at Renewable UK's Wave and Tidal conference in London on Wednesday 27th February 2013.

Baker Consultants and HR Wallingford join forces to provide sophisticated noise surveying monitoring and modelling service for marine environment.

Baker Consultants' marine team has been accepted to speak at RenewableUK's flagship conference in Glasgow on Wednesday 31st October 2012.

The former the industry standard for bat monitoring work, Anabats, have gradually been replaced with the new, more flexible technology of full spectrum acoustic monitoring, such as is possible with the SM2 platform. Over the last five years. Baker Consultants has found the SM2 from Wildlife Acoustics to have many advantages over the previous technology, so is acoustic monitoring in the marine environment undergoing a similar transition?

With the current renewable energy plans that include the development of extensive offshore wind farms along UK coasts, monitoring noise levels produced by offshore wind turbines is becoming an issue of increasing concern.

At the moment, noise monitoring for this task consists of deploying a single towed hydrophone from a vessel, which is let to drift for enough time to capture the noise profile in the designated area. However, this technique presents serious health and safety issues. With all on-board equipment turned off to minimise noise from the vessel, it could drift towards the installation.

The CNRS (French National Research Centre) has published a book entitled “Sensors for Ecology. Towards Integrated Knowledge of Ecosystems” which reviews current techniques for ecological research. It includes a chapter by our own Federica Pace!

Last month, Anna attended the first annual International Conference on Environmental Interactions with Marine Renewables, held in Kirkwall Orkney and involving a broad range of stakeholders in the industry.

With over 1000 participants from all fields of acoustics the conference was a melting pot of ideas for the applications of acoustics from bioacoustics to biomedical studies and optimisation of musical instruments and room acoustics.