Placing solar farms within offshore wind farms makes better use of the sea space, increases energy output, provides more continuous power over the seasons, and will drive down costs for green electricity production and the energy system.

“Oceans of Energy is proud to advance offshore solar further towards a real gamechanger in the renewable energy transition, by bringing these standardized, large scale offshore solar farms to the world,”

says Allard van Hoeken, Founder and CEO of Oceans of Energy. He continues:

“Offshore solar is becoming a major contributor to the energy transition in the North Sea. We are kickstarting the development of a standardized offshore solar building block, which fits right in-between four offshore wind turbines. This allows for optimized multi-source offshore energy farms without competing for scarce and limited land space.” 

Oceans of Energy is a pioneer in offshore solar, the company deployed the first in the world offshore solar farm for high waves in the rough Dutch North Sea in 2019. The company is building the first offshore solar farm to be installed within the Shell/Eneco Hollandse Kust Noord offshore wind farm in the North Sea. Its mission is to bring clean and abundant renewable energy in harmony with nature to people living along the coasts worldwide.

 

The partners

The collaboration coordinated by RINA, between offshore solar developer Oceans of Energy, four technology developers (Solarge, TKF, Pauwels Transformers, SolarCleano), five technical- and environmental consultancies (RINA, ABS, Aquatera Ltd, Aquatera Atlantico, and WavEC), three testing laboratories (MARIN, Fraunhofer CSP, SIRRIS), the marine science-policy think-tank European Marine Board, and the offshore wind farm developer Vattenfall as potential client for implementation, is aimed to resolve remaining challenges for the rollout of large scale offshore solar into new- and existing wind farms. This includes proving the robustness and performance of the solar panels in offshore conditions, as well as researching the impact on the environment while securing sustainability in the whole value-chain of this emerging industry.

“This project will contribute to enable feasible business cases of solar renewable energy offshore”,

states Andrea Bombardi, Carbon Reduction Excellence Executive Vice President of RINA.

“RINA, thanks to the leading experience in the provision of energy yield assessment services for solar plants and in floating offshore systems, will pioneer the development of a new predictive yield model applicable to this emerging technology. We will bring to the project our competence in ground-native solutions offshore, in static and dynamic analysis on dynamic export cables, in comparative analysis between different power export layouts, in the definition of recycling strategies for PVs and electrical components at the end of their life, and in the coordination of EU-funded projects.” 

Source: Oceans of Energy

 

Also interesting: