The Horizon Europe COMPASS (Comprehensive Offshore Management Platform for Assessing Sustainability) project has been launched to advance the environmental, social and economic sustainability of offshore wind farms across Europe through a comprehensive digital decision-support platform. The four-year initiative will develop a holistic, open-source platform integrating environmental, economic and social models with life cycle methodologies and an offshore wind farm digital twin. The system aims to improve understanding of how offshore wind farms interact with marine ecosystems and the benefits these ecosystems provide, enabling more transparent and informed decision-making.
The platform will combine life cycle assessment, social life cycle assessment and life cycle costing with ecosystem and socio-ecosystem metabolism models and ecosystem services assessments. This integrated framework is intended to support sustainability analysis for both bottom-fixed and floating offshore wind technologies across multiple European sea basins.
A core objective of the project is to deliver clear sustainability indicators and practical recommendations that can inform design choices and tender evaluations. Development will involve close cooperation with an end-user group consisting of offshore wind developers, environmental consultancies and policy decision-makers to support industry uptake.
The project is coordinated by France Energies Marines with scientific co-coordination by RWTH Aachen University. Academic partners include Universiteit Gent, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Lappeenrannan-Lahden Teknillinen Yliopisto, Technische Universität Berlin and Vrije Universiteit Brussel.
Research organisations participating in the project are Fundació Institut de Recerca de l’Energia de Catalunya and Norsk Institutt for Vannforskning alongside the coordinating institute. Industrial partners include Parkwind, RWE Offshore Wind and Natural Power, while small and medium-sized enterprise partners are Circular Srl and Euronovia.
Natural Power contributes expertise in offshore renewables, environmental assessment and ecosystem-based decision support as part of the wider consortium effort to deliver the integrated COMPASS sustainability platform.
