The Marine Renewable Energy (MRE) industry has seen recently a number of full scale deployments happening in UK waters. However, uncertainties remain regarding any environmental impacts of these devices, especially their potential interaction with marine species.
In fact, little is known about interactions of MRE devices with the environment and this is mainly due to the difficulties associated with the monitoring at high energy marine deployment sites. Industry, governmental bodies and research institutes need to work closely together in order to alleviate environmental uncertainties, de-risk the marine renewable energy sector, facilitate consenting and reduce the cost of delivering MRE.
The industrial partner Tidal Energy Limited (TEL) will deploy its DeltaStream tidal turbine in Ramsey Sound, Pembrokeshire in April 2014 for a period of 12 months. The DeltaStream turbine will operate without shut down mitigation, constituting one of the first commercial deployment in such manner. Nevertheless, the licensing requirements include the close monitoring of range behaviour and empirical encounter rates [1]. TEL is currently in the process of designing the installation and commissioning plans in order to meet their environmental monitoring requirements. The business partner requested the need of environmental R&D support from Swansea University regarding their Environmental Monitoring Plan (EMP). The intern will support TEL in the installation, commissioning and testing of the real-time marine mammals monitoring instrumentation which are undertaken using active and passive acoustics (radar, hydrophones, hardware and software) and will participate in the development, validation and refinement of these monitoring techniques. This joint knowledge transfer activity between Swansea University and TEL will offer an insight of the current specific MRE industry research needs and will result in a more focused academic research support to the sector.

Merin Broudic's work considers the environmental impact of marine energy devices, in particular underwater acoustics. He has 4 years experience in projects to record, process, analyse and characterise underwater noise in high tidal flow environments. He has experience of working with marine mammal observers and boat based surveys. He has worked closely with the industrial partner TEL since 2010, delivering underwater acoustic expertise. Merin has a good knowledge of the Pamuard software which will be used to process the raw data collected during marine mammals detection activities in the DeltaStream project.

[1] Sparling, C. E., Coram, A. J., McConnell, B., Thompson, D., Hawkins K. R. & Northridge, S. P, Wave and Tidal Consenting - Position Paper Series - Marine Mammal Impacts, funded by Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), Available at : http://www.renewableuk.com/en/publications/index.cfm/M