This study (‘Assessment of potential employment, skills and social implications of Offshore Renewable Energy development in the EU’) presents a comprehensive review of the potential employment, skills, and social implications of Offshore Renewable Energy (ORE) development in the European Union (EU).
It responds directly to the European Court of Auditors’ Special Report 22/2023, which identified a lack of systematic analysis of the socio-economic impacts of ORE, specifically in relation to employment, skills, and interactions with other maritime sectors such as fisheries.
The study identifies key areas of material impact and estimates socio-economic impacts within the EU, highlights data gaps and challenges that hinder robust impact assessments and provides recommendations to strengthen future evaluations.
The analysis focuses on offshore wind energy (OWE) as the most mature and widely deployed ORE technology in Europe, but the analytical framework developed was designed to be transferable to other emerging ORE technologies.
The framework identifies key impact areas of ORE including impact on economic outcomes, employment level, skills, quality of employment, public acceptance, and social cohesion and outlines relevant indicators, data sources, levels and methods of analysis to carry out assessments.
These guidelines were then used to analyse economic, employment and public attitude impacts at EU level and in five Member States (MSs): Germany, France, the Netherlands, Poland and Portugal, selected for their significant current or expanding OWE capacities.
