Is COWRIE continuing its good work?

In 2003 The Crown Estate announced the competition for sites in a second round of development. 15 new projects are planned as a result and all the projects will be much bigger than the first round of windfarms. Due to the success of COWRIE The Crown Estate required successful Round Two developers to pay a one-off fee which provided a substantial amount of money to COWRIE. Because of the size of the COWRIE fund it was decided to register it as a company in 2005.

Today COWRIE Ltd it has almost £3 million to spend on a range of research and education activities. More experts have been invited to join the environmental steering group and new groups have been set up to get new projects underway

"to advance and improve understanding and knowledge of the potential environmental impacts and benefits of offshore windfarm development in UK waters".

New areas of work have been identified. More environmental studies will be undertaken and the COWRIE Board are investigating how this new information can be used in education projects to raise awareness of the importance of the UK offshore wind programme.

The most exciting challenge for COWRIE is to develop a system and plan that will bring together all the environmental data and information collected by each developer during site investigations. Developers are required to give this data to The Crown Estate. They have asked COWRIE to provide a system that will look after and manage the data and make it available to all interest groups.

The following pages give you all the information you need to know about the work that COWRIE has already completed, as well as the new projects it is developing so make sure you visit us on a regular basis as we will be adding new information all the time.