To mitigate the social and environmental impacts of climate change, global CO2 emissions must be drastically and urgently curtailed. While various future pathways to a decarbonised society are possible, analysis by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change makes it clear that limiting global temperature increases to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels requires major structural changes in the supply of energy. Renewable energy production will have to be expanded dramatically if it is to provide the majority of global electricity production by the middle of the century. Offshore wind turbines, the largest rotating machines ever built, have the potential to provide very large volumes of clean electricity. It is cautiously estimated that the realisable United States offshore wind resource is more than twice the current national electricity demand. In some island nations such as the UK, the resource is even more abundant. Exploiting the stronger winds found offshore will involve the creation of substantial new industries involving hundreds of thousands of workers. Often out of sight, offshore wind turbines are also less likely to provoke resistance from neighbouring communities than onshore developments. Consequently, expansion of offshore wind farms is an explicit environmental, industrial and energy policy objective in many maritime countries. But organisational and institutional factors are proving to be serious barriers to policy implementation, slowing, delaying, or preventing expansion in some, but not all, countries. Previous analysis of the UK, a leader in offshore wind, suggests that key to enabling an offshore wind industry that can deliver the desired energy is the active coordination between disparate domains by an 'interested broker' or 'system builder'. These actors strive to create new institutional forms or 'ways of doing things' - activity sometimes referred to as 'institutional entrepreneurship'. Working with carefully selected project partners, who collectively offer £38k of in-kind support, this project will study the creation of offshore wind industries and the role played by institutional entrepreneurship in enabling or constraining their growth. Empirical field-work will be carried out in three major offshore wind markets: the UK, a somewhat unexpected leader given the conflictual nature of renewable energy politics in that country; Denmark, a pioneer in offshore wind with a strong coordinative role in the energy sector for the State; and the United States where a lack of coordination between actors has contributed to stifled growth to-date. The research will add to academic understanding of organisations and public policy, specifically how motivated actors are able to shape their environment through coordinative institutional entrepreneurship. Such understanding will have value to scholars researching energy systems in the context of large-scale change towards sustainability. The knowledge created in the course of the project will also be useful to policymakers seeking more effective offshore wind policies that overcome some of the organisational and institutional challenges currently slowing deployment or driving up costs, benefiting consumers and the environment. It will also provide businesses, civil society groups and others with a clearer understanding of how offshore wind industries emerge, and their potential role in shaping them. The skills development programme will provide training in all aspects of research management including finance, project planning and execution, networking and impact. The project is also designed to develop the applicant's quantitative research skills through externally provided training, drawing on the capacity of Exeter's Q-Step quantitative data-analysis programme as well as the ESRC-funded National Centre for Research Methods. To aid the building of international collaboration networks, a one month invited visiting researcher post has also been planned.

The UK is at the forefront of the development, adoption and export of Offshore Renewable Energy (ORE) technologies: offshore wind (OW), wave and tidal energy. To sustain this advantage, the UK must spearhead research and innovation in ORE, which will accelerate its adoption and widen the applicability of these technologies. Many organisations across the industry-academia spectrum contribute to ORE research and development (R&D) co-ordination and the ORE Supergen hub strategy will take a leadership role, integrating with these activities to guide and deliver fundamental research to advance the ORE sector. The role of the Supergen ORE hub is to provide research leadership for the ORE community to enable transformation to future scale ORE. The hub will articulate the vision for the future scale ORE energy landscape, will identify the innovations required and the fundamental research needed to underpin the innovation. It will also generate the pathway for translation of research and innovation into industry practice, for policy adaptation and public awareness in order to support the increased deployment of ORE technologies, reducing energy costs while increasing energy security, reducing CO2 emissions and supporting UK jobs. The hub will work closely with the ORE Catapult (ORECAT) and become well-connected with industry, government, the wider research community in the UK and internationally. It will bring together these groups to assemble the expertise and experience to define and target the innovations, research and actions to achieve the ambitious energy transformation envisioned for the UK. The new Supergen ORE hub will continue to support and build on the existing internationally leading academic capacity within these three research areas (OW, wave and tidal technology), whilst also enabling shared learning on common research challenges. The ORE hub will build a multi-disciplinary, collaborative approach, which will bring benefits through the sharing of best practice and exploitation of synergy, support equality and diversity and the development of the next generation of research leaders. The hub strategy provides an overview of research and innovation priorities, which will be addressed through multiple routes but linked through the hub, with activities designed to stimulate alignment across the research community and industry sectors to maximise engagement with prioritised research challenges through and beyond the hub time-scale. These include: 1. Networking and engagement activities to bring the research community together with industry and other stakeholders to ensure research efforts within the community are aligned, complementary and remain inspired by or relevant to industry challenges. This will include support and development of the ECR community to ensure sustainability and promote EDI within the sector as a whole. Actions will also be taken to identify potential cross over research synergies and opportunities for transfer of research between sectors and disciplines, both within and external to ORE. Furthermore, a structured communication plan built around progress of the community towards the sector research challenges will promote exploitation and commercialisation. 2. A set of core research work packages addressing priority topics selected and structured to maximize progress towards the sector objectives and building on the cross cutting expertise of the co-director team. 3. Targeted use of flexible fund as seed-corn activity leading to projects aligned with, and in partnership with, the hub.