“Energy Systems with Sea in their DNA”
René Garello (IMT Atlantique / OES), life Fellow
Context
The OSES conference series addresses offshore energy systems – with major emphasis on the word “systems”. Offshore wind has dominated the arena of energy harvesting offshore – and it has done a superb job of showing just how rich the energy resources are offshore and how inexpensively these energy resources can be exploited. Expectations on cost reduction for all offshore energy systems are now driving innovations like never before. This is probably more true for offshore wind than for any other offshore energy form. In the past, the presence of subsidies has meant that the offshore wind technology developers could take what was essentially a design for onshore wind turbines, scale it up, marinise the nacelle and then support the turbine on a tower that looks as much as possible like the towers supporting onshore machines.
The paradigm of trying to take energy systems developed for application on land and port them into the marine environment is now being challenged fatally. Logic calls for machines to be optimised to the environment for which they intended and not simply to emulate machines that have been optimised for a very different environment. Perhaps surprisingly, it will be system cost that actually drives the innovation in future.
OSES2019 focused especially on systems that are designed with marine DNA already in their blood. This includes floating platforms for both wind turbines and PV collectors, hybrid systems that cater for the collection of energy in multiple forms, the integration of energy storage with electricity generation and various energy harvesting approaches that simply have no equivalent on land.
OSES2019 was a significant agent of change – helping the community to observe that the future of offshore energy is not simply a linear extrapolation of the past.
Meeting
The meeting held in Brest, France, on July 10 to 12, 2019, gathered about 70 international participants from around the world, ranging from academia to industry or agencies. The event was sponsored by the IEEE Oceanic Engineering Society (OES) with the support of France Energies Marines, the French Institute for Energy Transition dedicated to Marine Renewable Energies. The OES French chapter was running the local arrangements and the overall technical aspects of the workshops were handled by the Ocean Sustainable Energy Systems (OSES) Technology Committee. The workshop was organized around 45 oral presentations and 5 plenary talks. It reviewed the latest advances in storage models, energy generation and integration of renewables with storage. A YouTube rendition of the meeting can be seen at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5YooMXa5Mg
The technical management of the sessions were supervised by the OSES “team”, Tonio Sant, Seamus Garvey, Rupp Cariveau and Jochen Bard. 12 sessions were organized, with two half-days of parallel sessions. The sessions were divided in the following main themes:
- OFFSHORE PLATFORMS AND STORAGE MODEL TESTS
- IMPLEMENTATION OF NEW WIND AND STORAGE
- SUSTAINABILITY IN OFFSHORE ENGINEERING
- ADVANCEMENTS IN STORAGE – PART 1
- GENERATION – WAVE ENERGY
- INTEGRATING RENEWABLES WITH STORAGE – PART 1, WIND
- INTEGRATING RENEWABLES WITH STORAGE – PART 2
- ADVANCED GENERATION AND STORAGE
- ADVANCEMENTS IN STORAGE – PART 2
- CAES (Compressed Air Energy Storage)
- DESALINATION AND NAVIGATION
- GENERATION – TIDAL
Plenary talks
The following plenary talks presented the visions and developments of global programs and R&D works:
Funding the Innovation: What is in for Our Ocean?
Andreea Strachinescu
Head of Unit, Directorate-General for Maritime Affairs and Fisheries, European Commission
An Overview of Offshore Renewable Energy Development in France
Yann-Hervé De Roeck
General Manager, French Energies Marines
Wind Energy Development in the U.S.
Daniel Laird
Director, National Wind Technology Center, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, USA
Wave Energy at Crossroads
Gregorio Iglesias Rodriguez
Professor at MaREI, University College Cork
Requirements of a Low-Carbon Energy Infrastructure
Axel Laval
Energy Asset Manager, Crown Estate, UK

Yann-Hervé De Roeck addressing the attendees
during his plenary talk.







Dr. James V. Candy is the Chief Scientist for Engineering and former Director of the Center for Advanced Signal & Image Sciences at the University of California, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Dr. Candy received a commission in the USAF in 1967 and was a Systems Engineer/Test Director from 1967 to 1971. He has been a Researcher at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory since 1976 holding various positions including that of Project Engineer for Signal Processing and Thrust Area Leader for Signal and Control Engineering. Educationally, he received his B.S.E.E. degree from the University of Cincinnati and his M.S.E. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Florida, Gainesville. He is a registered Control System Engineer in the state of California. He has been an Adjunct Professor at San Francisco State University, University of Santa Clara, and UC Berkeley, Extension teaching graduate courses in signal and image processing. He is an Adjunct Full-Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Dr. Candy is a Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) and elected as a Life Member (Fellow) at the University of Cambridge (Clare Hall College). He is a member of Eta Kappa Nu and Phi Kappa Phi honorary societies. He was elected as a Distinguished Alumnus by the University of Cincinnati. Dr. Candy received the IEEE Distinguished Technical Achievement Award for the “development of model-based signal processing in ocean acoustics.” Dr. Candy was selected as a IEEE Distinguished Lecturer for oceanic signal processing as well as presenting an IEEE tutorial on advanced signal processing available through their video website courses. He was nominated for the prestigious Edward Teller Fellowship at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Dr. Candy was awarded the Interdisciplinary Helmholtz-Rayleigh Silver Medal in Signal Processing/Underwater Acoustics by the Acoustical Society of America for his technical contributions. He has published over 225 journal articles, book chapters, and technical reports as well as written three texts in signal processing, “Signal Processing: the Model-Based Approach,” (McGraw-Hill, 1986), “Signal Processing: the Modern Approach,” (McGraw-Hill, 1988), “Model-Based Signal Processing,” (Wiley/IEEE Press, 2006) and “Bayesian Signal Processing: Classical, Modern and Particle Filtering” (Wiley/IEEE Press, 2009). He was the General Chairman of the inaugural 2006 IEEE Nonlinear Statistical Signal Processing Workshop held at the Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge. He has presented a variety of short courses and tutorials sponsored by the IEEE and ASA in Applied Signal Processing, Spectral Estimation, Advanced Digital Signal Processing, Applied Model-Based Signal Processing, Applied Acoustical Signal Processing, Model-Based Ocean Acoustic Signal Processing and Bayesian Signal Processing for IEEE Oceanic Engineering Society/ASA. He has also presented short courses in Applied Model-Based Signal Processing for the SPIE Optical Society. He is currently the IEEE Chair of the Technical Committee on “Sonar Signal and Image Processing” and was the Chair of the ASA Technical Committee on “Signal Processing in Acoustics” as well as being an Associate Editor for Signal Processing of ASA (on-line JASAXL). He was recently nominated for the Vice Presidency of the ASA and elected as a member of the Administrative Committee of IEEE OES. His research interests include Bayesian estimation, identification, spatial estimation, signal and image processing, array signal processing, nonlinear signal processing, tomography, sonar/radar processing and biomedical applications.
Kenneth Foote is a Senior Scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. He received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from The George Washington University in 1968, and a Ph.D. in Physics from Brown University in 1973. He was an engineer at Raytheon Company, 1968-1974; postdoctoral scholar at Loughborough University of Technology, 1974-1975; research fellow and substitute lecturer at the University of Bergen, 1975-1981. He began working at the Institute of Marine Research, Bergen, in 1979; joined the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in 1999. His general area of expertise is in underwater sound scattering, with applications to the quantification of fish, other aquatic organisms, and physical scatterers in the water column and on the seafloor. In developing and transitioning acoustic methods and instruments to operations at sea, he has worked from 77°N to 55°S.
René Garello, professor at Télécom Bretagne, Fellow IEEE, co-leader of the TOMS (Traitements, Observations et Méthodes Statistiques) research team, in Pôle CID of the UMR CNRS 3192 Lab-STICC.
Professor Mal Heron is Adjunct Professor in the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia, and is CEO of Portmap Remote Ocean Sensing Pty Ltd. His PhD work in Auckland, New Zealand, was on radio-wave probing of the ionosphere, and that is reflected in his early ionospheric papers. He changed research fields to the scattering of HF radio waves from the ocean surface during the 1980s. Through the 1990s his research has broadened into oceanographic phenomena which can be studied by remote sensing, including HF radar and salinity mapping from airborne microwave radiometers . Throughout, there have been one-off papers where he has been involved in solving a problem in a cognate area like medical physics, and paleobiogeography. Occasionally, he has diverted into side-tracks like a burst of papers on the effect of bushfires on radio communications. His present project of the Australian Coastal Ocean Radar Network (ACORN) is about the development of new processing methods and applications of HF radar data to address oceanography problems. He is currently promoting the use of high resolution VHF ocean radars, based on the PortMap high resolution radar.
Hanu Singh graduated B.S. ECE and Computer Science (1989) from George Mason University and Ph.D. (1995) from MIT/Woods Hole.He led the development and commercialization of the Seabed AUV, nine of which are in operation at other universities and government laboratories around the world. He was technical lead for development and operations for Polar AUVs (Jaguar and Puma) and towed vehicles(Camper and Seasled), and the development and commercialization of the Jetyak ASVs, 18 of which are currently in use. He was involved in the development of UAS for polar and oceanographic applications, and high resolution multi-sensor acoustic and optical mapping with underwater vehicles on over 55 oceanographic cruises in support of physical oceanography, marine archaeology, biology, fisheries, coral reef studies, geology and geophysics and sea-ice studies. He is an accomplished Research Student advisor and has made strong collaborations across the US (including at MIT, SIO, Stanford, Columbia LDEO) and internationally including in the UK, Australia, Canada, Korea, Taiwan, China, Japan, India, Sweden and Norway. Hanu Singh is currently Chair of the IEEE Ocean Engineering Technology Committee on Autonomous Marine Systems with responsibilities that include organizing the biennial IEEE AUV Conference, 2008 onwards. Associate Editor, IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering, 2007-2011. Associate editor, Journal of Field Robotics 2012 onwards.
Milica Stojanovic graduated from the University of Belgrade, Serbia, in 1988, and received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Northeastern University in Boston, in 1991 and 1993. She was a Principal Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and in 2008 joined Northeastern University, where she is currently a Professor of electrical and computer engineering. She is also a Guest Investigator at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Milica’s research interests include digital communications theory, statistical signal processing and wireless networks, and their applications to underwater acoustic systems. She has made pioneering contributions to underwater acoustic communications, and her work has been widely cited. She is a Fellow of the IEEE, and serves as an Associate Editor for its Journal of Oceanic Engineering (and in the past for Transactions on Signal Processing and Transactions on Vehicular Technology). She also serves on the Advisory Board of the IEEE Communication Letters, and chairs the IEEE Ocean Engineering Society’s Technical Committee for Underwater Communication, Navigation and Positioning. Milica is the recipient of the 2015 IEEE/OES Distinguished Technical Achievement Award.
Dr. Paul C. Hines was born and raised in Glace Bay, Cape Breton. From 1977-1981 he attended Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, graduating with a B.Sc. (Hon) in Engineering-Physics.