The Blue Growth Farm

Project overview

The Blue Growth Farm aims to develop and demonstrate an automated, modular and environmentally friendly multi functional platform for open sea farm installations of the Blue Growth Industry.

The concept of developing multi-use sea platforms has become one of the EU’s most interesting and ambitious projects in order to ensure the integrated, sustainable and ecological exploitation of open sea resources.

In particular, a suitable combination of aquaculture and offshore renewable energy production and the application of appropriate technical knowledge are key in achieving the sustainable exploitation of marine resources, in support of the growing global demand for seafood and energy from renewable sources.

The aim of the Blue Growth Farm project is thus to produce advanced industrial knowledge with a fully integrated and efficient offshore multipurpose floating platform, which provides a central protected pool to host an automated aquaculture system, capable of producing high quality fish, as well as a large storage and deck areas to host a commercial 10 MW wind turbine and a number of wave energy converters (WEC). The platform results from the suitable assembly of low-cost, corrosion-resistance, low-maintenance concrete caisson modules.

Relevant R&D challenges are addressed in the project with the specific strategy of designing and testing solutions on an outdoor sea based physical prototype and then use the results of those field trials to enhance the design of the full scale platform.

Work package 8

The main goal of WP8 is to set the basis for the social acceptance of the proposed offshore multipurpose platform, by mapping of marine stakeholders, developing methodology for a tailor-made participatory process and identifying solutions to involve the marine stakeholders in the project and report findings in relation to social license theory.