Hello and welcome to Business Daily. I'm Lawrence Knight. Today I'll be asking whether Europe's North Sea is about to become a clean energy powerhouse.

For the North Sea countries, we foresee 45% of the total energy demand being covered by offshore wind alone. It's big, urgent and we need to start quickly.

Yes, coast-to-coast wind turbines could help Europe go carbon neutral.

But can it happen quickly enough, given the serious engineering challenges involved?

This is a rotating structure in the sea that's operational in all weathers,

that you effectively mount on the seabed by banging a giant foundation into the sand

and then bolting a huge steel tower to the top of that.

That's the future of Imperial College in London.

It's quite a surprising sight here.

I'm standing next to basically a very, very long glass box full of water,

and waves are running the full length of the box.

And I'm here with Robert Gross.

Robert, you're with Imperial College.

Where are we here?

Yeah, I'm Dr. Robert Gross.

I'm a specialist in energy and environmental policy and technology at Imperial College.

We're in the hydrodynamics lab looking at some of their fantastic wave generating equipment.

This one was standing next to is kind of a long, narrow channel.

It's about 30 metres long.

There's something else over here. What's this?

Okay, so this is the main basin.

It's basically a large swimming pool that's used for commercial testing of marine structures.

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