From its instigation in 2014 the “Offshore Energy and Storage” (OSES) conference series has always been about understanding and minimising the total cost of renewable energy from offshore environments whilst also attending to the sustainability of the solutions presented. OSES2023 will take place in a world that has seen very clearly just how volatile energy costs can become if the heavy reliance on fossil fuels remains and just how important energy independence is for the integrity of every country. Until OSES2019, the primary motivation for exploring offshore energy was based mainly on trying to address climate-change. Nature had already begun to bare her climate-change teeth somewhat by then but she has become much more fierce since then and will clearly go much further. Offshore energy can no longer be simply a general direction of travel without any firm timescale. It must become an imperative that can mature very quickly to assume its inevitable position as one of the largest sources of energy for a Net Zero world. Flexibility solutions must accompany the primary generation technologies in terms of development from both technical and economic/market perspectives.

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OSES2023 sets out to make a major contribution to the maturing and consolidation of ideas that will be needed to achieve very high penetrations of generation from the offshore renewables. As any trained observer would now recognise, the decades-old measure of “Levelised Cost of Electricity” needs to be consigned to historical record to be replaced by brand new thinking.