Smartbay: the development and implementation of an advanced marine technology platform on the west coast of Ireland

This paper is about the development, implementation and operation of
SmartBay - a subsea cabled observatory and supporting infrastructure to stimulate
the development of marine technology in Ireland. Blue Growth is the long term
strategy of the European Union to support sustainable growth in the marine sector
and offers great potential for innovation.
The development of Ocean Technologies currently presents a number of challenges
globally in terms of costs, reliability and longevity of infrastructure in the
development of Renewable Energy, Blue Biotechnology, Water, and Environmental
Monitoring & Management as well as more established markets such as Oil and
Gas, Shipping and Security and Fishing and Aquaculture. We discuss the rationale
behind the development of SmartBay in terms of addressing these challenges and
focus particularly in the area of marine renewable energy technology development
The design and installation phases of SmartBay are discussed. Costs were minimised,
whilst maximising the range of features and applications that the infrastructure can
provide to scientific and commercial users. The scientific subsea instrument node is
also described in detail, along with the advanced supporting cyber-infrastructure
that ensures the data is collected, processed archived and displayed as per end
user requirements. The facility provides access to state of the art marine assets and
resources for Researchers, Designers, Innovators and Entrepreneurs within Ireland
and the EU and is a unique catalyst in the attraction of inward investment and
venture capital investment.
The SmartBay infrastructure platform centres on a core technology or service, the
provision of high quality, time-series marine data. This is essential for a broader,
interdependent ecosystem of businesses to develop and supply complementary
value-added products and applications to wide multidisciplinary set of users.
SmartBay’s role as a key technology node in broader European initiatives Ocean
Observation initiatives like the European Multidisciplinary Seafloor and water
column observatory (EMSO), which has been established as a European Research
Infrastructure consortium (ERIC) is also discussed.