Offshore wind services company Venterra Group said it is expanding its marine hard bottom benthic and hard structure offering, underpinned by the environmental capabilities of its marine science consultancy, INSPIRE Environmental, and small business partner, Marine Imaging Technologies, a subsea imaging company.
According to Venterra, the expanded offering addresses increasing requirements to monitor marine growth on both introduced hard surfaces (e.g. turbines and infrastructure) and native hard bottom (e.g. rocks and boulders) to assess impacts associated with offshore wind project development.
This offering will also support assessment of nature-based design for scour and cable protection associated with offshore wind, as well as climate resilience projects, the beneficial use of dredged material, and collection of high resolution, 3-D video for mass media scientific education and communications.
Between INSPIRE and Marine Imaging Technologies, the partners have worked on almost half of all US offshore wind projects for blue chip clients such as Orsted, Equinor, RWE, Ocean Winds, and Siemens Gamesa, as well as agencies like NYSERDA, NOAA, USACE, and USEPA.
Paul Doherty, Venterra’s Executive Vice President for Engineering said: “With this new collaboration between Venterra’s INSPIRE and Marine Imaging Technology, we are making it possible for offshore wind developers to clearly visualize the underwater environment, avoid or minimize environmental impacts and make cost-efficient design decisions. But what is truly brilliant about this offering is its ability to serve multiple industry needs in the same deployment, aligning biological monitoring with monitoring of engineering parameters to support operations and maintenance. Marine Imaging Technologies’ high resolution subsea imaging capability will also advance our recently announced Marine Archaeology offering.”