Xodus Appoints New Director to Drive Growth in Renewables Sector

International energy consultancy Xodus Group has appointed Peter Tipler as its Renewables Director to help drive growth across the sector.

Having been with Xodus for almost ten years, Mr. Tipler has worked across several roles in the company’s renewable energy, environment and decommissioning divisions.

Mr. Tipler said: “I’m honoured to take on the role and hope my experience and knowledge of the projects over the years will allow Xodus to build up the capabilities right across the renewables industry – from wave and tidal to offshore wind.

“We have a long history of working in the sector. Our view is that offshore renewable energy is a fundamental part of the global future energy mix. We aren’t waiting for it to happen, we are making it happen.”

Xodus will share its wave and tidal experiences at a global marine energy event tomorrow (June 12). Liz Foubister, renewables specialist at Xodus Group, will present on ‘Silent Springs - How Best to Perform Environmental Assessments’ on the opening day of the International Conference on Ocean Energy (ICOE 2018), which takes place this week (12-14 June) in Normandy, France.

In 2017, Xodus delivered the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) and license application for the Holyhead Deep project in Wales. The developer Minesto recently completed the installation of all supporting components and systems needed to deliver power produced by its Deep Green DG500 tidal energy device, including a gravity base foundation and a micro grid system that will facilitate grid compatibility testing.

Mrs. Foubister said: “As Minesto moves through the commissioning phase and into operations, monitoring of the device will provide important information to confirming the predictions made in the environmental impact assessment, particularly with regards to marine mammals and the behaviors of them around the device. Monitoring of these early deployments of full scale prototypes can provide an important contribution to us starting to find out more about some of the present uncertainties relating to potential environmental impacts and evidence to support future consenting and EIAs.

“With an increasing number of prototypes being deployed and monitored we are now in position to start to start to learn some lessons with regards to the successfulness and useful ness of the monitoring that has been undertaken to date, or is planned. My presentation summarises the environmental monitoring experiences to date drawing on the findings of a recent developer questionnaire survey.”

Xodus also recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Atlantis Resources to pursue the development of a tidal energy project in Japan. The ambition for this agreement is to secure funding and establish a commercially viable tidal energy demonstration project of three to eight turbines in the country.

ICOE is a global marine energy event focused on the industrial development of ocean energy. Held every two years, the goal of both conference and exhibition is to share recent experiences from research and demonstration efforts.