Abstract
The Portuguese Government is developing legislation and regulations to create a Pilot Zone to support the deployment of offshore wave energy prototypes and farms. The Pilot Zone will be designed to support both the initial phase of the demonstration and the pre-commercial and commercial phases of wave energy utilization, up to a few hundreds of megawatts of installed power. It is of great importance that Portugal intends to address the environmental issues in a way that can be later considered as “Best-practice”. The future reputation of this industry may partly depend on the success of this demonstration zone. This paper aims to give advice on an environmental management and monitoring strategy for the Portuguese Pilot zone taking into account former related projects, like the offshore wind farm experience in Denmark and the WaveHub.