COMPASS (Comprehensive Offshore Management Platform for Assessing Sustainability)

Europe is undergoing a rapid expansion of offshore wind energy, which is essential for achieving climate neutrality but also creates environmental and socio-economic challenges. Offshore wind farm development can generate both positive and negative impacts, highlighting the need for holistic sustainability assessments across all spatial scales and life-cycle phases. However, existing tools typically address these impacts in isolation, limiting integrated decision-making.

The COMPASS project addresses this gap by developing an innovative, integrated platform to assess the cumulative impacts of offshore wind farms. By combining life-cycle-based environmental, economic, and social assessment tools with digital twins, the project provides a comprehensive understanding of both global and local impacts. Using diverse case studies across European sea basins and a range of offshore wind technologies, the project delivers a user-friendly decision-support platform to help stakeholders explore cost-effective solutions, optimise sustainability trade-offs, and improve the overall performance and acceptability of offshore wind projects.

The project is coordinated by France Énergies Marines and involves 14 partners from France, Germany, Belgium. Spain, Finland, Italy and Norway. These include research and academic institutions (France Énergies Marines, RWTH Aachen University, Technische Universität Berlin, Ghent University, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Institut de Recerca en Energia de Catalunya, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, LUT University, and the Norwegian Institute for Water Research), industry and developers (RWE and Parkwind), consultancies (Natural Power, Circular SRL, and Euronovia Conseil), ensuring a strong transdisciplinary and end-user-driven consortium.

Main objectives:

•  To provide a benchmark for the sustainability assessment of OWF to provide consistency for the assessment

• To specify the platform user requirements and profiles through a co-production process with a diverse stakeholder End-User Group

• To do the preparatory work for the definition of the holistic sustainability assessment framework

• To analyse existing sustainability assessment software tools to identify gaps, foster coherency and create the platform specifications