News from the ICOE 2016 Conference

The final week of February 2016 saw me relocate to the Scottish capital for a different and exciting week. As much as I am enjoying working on the technical development of ForeCoast Marine, it was a nice change of tack to briefly escape my computer screen and fluctuating love/hate relationship with Python.

On Monday the 22nd I attended the first ever IDCORE Symposium. A conference created and organised by IDCORE Students that included brilliant presentations from the IDCORE research engineers, an informative poster session and an interesting overview of the energy sector from keynote speaker Mike Colechin of the Energy Technologies Institute (ETI). A great success all round and an excellent opportunity to bring together academics and industrial partners to drive forward the offshore energy sector. Congratulations to all those involved, in particular to lead organiser Stephanie Mann.

The Symposium was a perfect warm up for the main event of the week – the 6th International Conference on Ocean Energy, or ICOE 2016. Delegates and ocean energy experts from around the world gathered at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre with the aim of trying to accelerate the development of ocean energy from “concept to commercialisation”. A fantastic experience that left me with a renewed sense of optimism and confidence in this exciting sector.

Dr Mark Lawless did a great job presenting ForeCoast® Marine to a busy conference hall on the third day of the conference. The conference session, entitled “De-Risking Technologies, Insurance and Project Finance”, highlighted the huge potential of both the Mission Planner and Gamer Mode for reducing metocean risk prior to and during marine operations. The following Q&A session that overran by at least an extra 10 minutes (into our 15 minute coffee break!) was a clear indication of the audience’s acknowledgement of the potential and benefit of ForeCoast® Marine and the other technologies and strategies discussed by the panel of experts.

Finally, the conference was an excellent opportunity to meet with members of the MetOffice and EMEC, who are both important project partners in the development of ForeCoast® Marine. A productive meeting on the Thursday morning allowed me to put some faces to names of people I have been in email contact with for a while now. Hearing about some of the on-going operations at EMEC has me eagerly looking forward to the IDCORE trip to Orkney in mid-April! Right now though is the return trip to Skipton to see if I can patch things up with Python.