Offshore Wind (OSW) is critical for the UK's economy and energy security. It is also an area of huge investment, for example £14bn has been committed up to the end of 2021 for new OSW sites - the 4th largest construction programme in the UK. Beyond this, the UK's current 2030 OSW installed capacity targets will require £48bn of investment and provide direct employment for 27,000 people. Despite the growing maturity of the OSW sector, certain elements of the installed infrastructure remain problematic. Principally, problems associated with subsea power cables that transport and distribute the electricity generated offshore in wind turbine generators to the onshore transmission system currently account for 75% of the cost of all insurance claims and faults typically take 100+ days to rectify. This leads to breaks in supply and loss of revenue for the wind farm operator which in the long term can lead to longer payback periods and reduced investment elsewhere in their renewables portfolio. In shallow waters these cables must be protected from anchors and fishing gear and the primary protection method is to bury the cable below the seabed. The cable burial depth is a compromise between economic cost of burial (going deeper takes longer, requires larger ships and may require more complex operations) and risk to the cable being damaged by anchors/fishing gear penetrating the seabed. Within this context, anchor-cable interactions currently account for 85% of power cable failures. The planned rapid expansion of offshore wind around the UK - installed capacity increasing 7.5 times over the next 30 years - will require new cable installations within some of the busiest shipping/fishing waters in the world and it is essential that these new cables are installed at the appropriate depth. However, the industry currently lacks appropriate scientific tools to determine anchor penetration depths in different soil conditions. Instead they use simple look-up tables based on very broad descriptive classifications of the soils on the seabed that basically split the huge spectrum of real soil conditions into two categories - soft or hard. This approach has been shown to be highly conservative in some soils leading to unnecessarily deep (and costly) burial. However, it is clearly non-conservative in other conditions as anchor-cable interactions dominate cable failures. This proposal will tackle the lack of sound anchor penetration models head on and, through physical testing and computational modelling, develop a toolkit to assess anchor penetration in different soil conditions. This anchor penetration prediction tool will be based on the site investigation data typically available along cabling routes and avoid the use of oversimplistic look-up tables. Its development will be guided by an industrial project steering group made up of key parties from the OSW sector. Crucially, this innovative anchor penetration model will be calibrated and validated using a geodatabase comprising actual site investigation data. Model performance will be assessed against proven, demonstrable ground conditions and therefore will not rely on hypothetical ground conditions which can be oversimplified using current cable burial assessment techniques (e.g. descriptive single-type soils that do not change with burial depths, as opposed to more complex, multi-layered soil types). In addition to the anchor penetration predictive tool, a number of spatial mapping layers (specific to the UK Continental Shelf) will be created, derived from the tool application to known ground conditions across the UK seafloor. These mapping layers will be made openly available, and are anticipated to feed into high-level spatial planning decisions at project concept stage. In summary, this project will provide an industry usable anchor penetration model allowing the OSW sector to answer the key cable burial question - how deep is deep enough?

Geotechnical infrastructure fundamentally underpins the transport, energy and utility networks of our society. The design of this infrastructure faces increasing challenges related to construction in harsher or more complex environments and stricter operating conditions. Modern design approaches recognise that the strength and stiffness of ground, and therefore the safety and resilience of our infrastructure, changes through time under the exposure to in-service loading - whether from trains, traffic, waves, currents, seasonal moisture cycles, redevelopment of built structures or nearby construction in congested urban areas. However, advances in geotechnical analysis methods have not been matched by better tools to probe and test the ground in situ, in a way that represents realistic real-world loading conditions. This research will improve current geotechnical site investigation practice by developing ROBOCONE - a new site investigation tool for intelligent ground characterisation - and its interpretative theoretical framework - from data to design. ROBOCONE will combine modern technologies in robotic control and sensor miniaturisation with new theoretical analyses of soil-structure interaction. Breaking free from the kinematic constraints of conventional site investigation tools, ROBOCONE will feature three modular sections which can be remotely actuated and controlled to impose horizontal, vertical and torsional kinematic mechanisms in the ground closely mimicking loading and deformation histories experienced during the entire lifespan of a geotechnical infrastructure. The device development will be supported by new theoretical approaches to interpret ROBOCONE's data to provide objective and reliable geotechnical parameters, ready for use in the modern "whole-life" design of infrastructure. This research will provide a paradigm shift in equipment for in situ ground characterisation. ROBOCONE will enable the cost-effective and reliable characterisation of advanced soil properties and their changes with time directly in-situ, minimising the need for costly and time-consuming laboratory investigations, which are invariably affected by sampling and testing limitations. Geotechnical in-situ characterisation will be brought into step with modern, resilient and optimised geotechnical design approaches.

Never in human history has there been such an urgent need for a step-change in energy production. With the goal of achieving a carbon neutral state by 2050, the UK is the first major economy to pass net zero emissions laws and lead the world by example. In answer to this impellent necessity, offshore renewables -particularly wind- are expanding at a rapid pace. Many of UK's offshore wind turbines (OWT) developments will need to be fixed or anchored in chalk, a highly variable soft rock that covers much of Northern Europe and is widespread under the North and Baltic Seas. In most cases that will be achieved by pushing or driving large steel piles into this soft rock under the seabed. That installation process is difficult because of the unprecedented scale of some of these foundations (monopiles), because the conditions of the chalk at the interface modified by installation are poorly known, the mechanical behaviour of chalk is complex and because working offshore leaves little room for error. Apart from its inherent difficulty, the installation process essentially modifies the chalk around the foundation. As a result of those changes, there are still some important gaps in our ability to predict properties that are basic for safe and efficient operation, such as the initial and the evolved axial capacity and lateral stiffness of monopiles through their in-service lifetime characterised by complex wind and wave cyclic load history. The research proposed will improve the efficiency and cost effectiveness of piles driven in soft rocks to support the further development of renewable energy structures offshore through rigorous numerical and experimental modelling. The key aims are to improve pile drivability assessment for open-ended piles supporting OWT and to quantify the effects of installation on long-term in-service performance of OWT foundations. The main deliverable will be to develop practical tools to incorporate these effects within engineering analysis and design suitable for both onshore and offshore applications.

Increased energy storage storage is needed on the electrical network to support high levels of variable renewable electricity such as wind and solar to enable us to reach our net-zero goals. The UK network currently has 5.3GW of energy storage of which 1.3GW is battery energy storage and this is expected to grow by at least 8GW by 2030. However, this alone does not meet the estimated required capacity, we therefore need to use the storage that we have optimally, for example, the location of storage and when we use it is critical to avoid congestion on the network. We also need to promote the installation of different types of storage that can operate over different time scales so that for example excess generation in one season can be used in the next. The aim of the project is to determine how different distributed energy storage assets, of different sizes and technologies, can be integrated into the grid as part of a whole-system solution to enable adaptability, flexibility and resilience. The project will investigate where and how assets are connected to the grid, how they are controlled and what policies and market conditions are required to meet our storage requirements. The research will be carried out across 5 collaborating institutions with the work underpinned by experiments using operational grid-scale storage demonstrators operated within the consortium. The outputs will include: - Recommendations for optimal planning and scheduling of distributed storage under different policy and market conditions including incentives/regulation of locational deployment - The impacts of different levels of coordination of distributed storage across location, scale, and markets - Demonstrations of practical, scalable solutions for the coordinated control of storage assets and other sources of flexibility - A roadmap that describes the decision points and options for the energy system as distributed energy storage grows according to different scenarios to 2035.

THE PROBLEM: Offshore windfarms will be developed at an accelerated schedule under fast-track plans to switch away from fossil fuels. With ever larger offshore windfarms, and the cumulative effects of climate change, we thus urgently need to understand the way the seabed is modified in response and how such changes affect the wider marine ecosystem. When natural currents in the sea deviate around the wind turbines or anchors, the forces acting on the bed enhance, making sediments move and stay in suspension. This reduces the clarity of the water and changes the shape and sediment composition of the seabed, with impacts stretching far beyond the object. The seabed supports ecosystems that deliver a wide range of services incl. fishing, carbon storage, aggregates and coastal protection. The climate crisis will stretch impacts even further and into coastal zones, as future storm waves and rising sea levels will alter the ways energy from the sea is transferred to the seabed. All these changes combined can have wide-reaching impacts for organisms that live on or in the seabed, potentially changing biodiversity (species richness) and the delivery of some of these ecosystem services. The impacts at the seabed extend through the food chain to the water column and beyond as seabed dwelling fish are consumed by seabirds and cetaceans. Aggregations of fish can be strongly associated to particular seabed properties. If displacement or mortality occurs amongst these important prey species, this has knock-on effects for the deep-diving predators that cannot afford to be less efficient in foraging for food, like the seabirds that are protected by legislation. During this pivotal time of energy transition and national security, it is of crucial importance to better understand and unlock the potential of the marine environment for a renewable energy transition with added benefits to the ecosystem. AIM: This proposal sets out a strategy to assess the seabed response to the combination of accelerated windfarm expansion and accelerated climate change, and to quantify the implications for (1) biodiversity, (2) ecosystem services, (3) habitats, and (4) interactions between seabird populations and their food. We ultimately seek to help identify opportunities that benefit the conservation of species and increase biodiversity around windfarms. We will help windfarm developers design their monitoring strategies long beyond the life-span of our project. SUMMARY OF METHODS AND OUTPUTS: Via a multi-proxy study using observations, laboratory experiments and models, we will assess and map, under different climate predictions, how the stresses on the bed will be modified by 2050, how the distribution of seabed habitats and biodiversity will change, and how that drives changes to ecosystem services and the foraging success of deep-diving seabirds. We will design relevant scenarios, where we consider offshore windfarm size, scour mitigation strategies, predator behaviour and the ecosystem's vulnerability to change due to the combined effect of accelerated windfarm expansion and climate change. We will use the Eastern Irish Sea area as case study, as it is the home of a variety of seabird species with specific predator-prey relationships, of diverse seabed types and of considerable windfarm expansion nearby existing windfarms. To help all developers of windfarms in the UK, UK-scale maps will be made of the vulnerability of the seabed to change, and a new seabird vulnerability index will be developed. Our quantification of how these processes from seabed to seabirds interact can directly inform/feed into existing and future decision support tools. We will provide a tool where stakeholders can run their own simulations anywhere around the UK and for any given model/data resolution to quantify uncertainty levels of bed stress caused by windfarms, with cascading effects of uncertainty in habitat and biodiversity distribution and ecosystem services.