Floating Offshore Wind Platform Strengthening Transparent Seabird Impact Assessment
Floating offshore wind is not just about clean megawatts; it is also a unique opportunity to understand how wildlife and renewable infrastructure share space. Around the DemoSATH floating platform off the Basque coast, Saitec Offshore Technologies has turned energy production into a living laboratory: DemoSATH Lab. While this article focuses on birds, one of the most sensitive and high-priority environmental lines of work, DemoSATH Lab brings together a wider monitoring programme, including underwater noise, marine fauna interactions, and carbon-footprint assessment, among others. Together with RWE and the Kansai Electric Power Corporation, Saitec is pioneering new ways to monitor birds in the Mundaka-Cabo de Ogoño Special Protection Area for Birds. After two years combining field ornithology, automated detection, and continuous CCTV, DemoSATH Lab is now advancing with artificial intelligence (AI) to improve detection, recognise ringed individuals, and quantify collisions using blade-facing cameras, maximising knowledge, transparency and biodiversity protection.
By Ane Ugena Ispizua, Javier Del Real Tuñón and Enrique Garea García, Saitec, Spain
DemoSATH, a 2MW floating offshore wind platform operating at the Biscay Marine Energy Platform (BiMEP) since 2023, is both a power plant and an open-air laboratory. Bird interactions are continuously tracked, feeding data into DemoSATH Lab to refine monitoring methods and strengthen biodiversity protection in offshore wind projects.
