Posters

Abstract

The offshore wind industry's success story is resulting in enormous offshore energy infrastructure projects. Large sites are selected and prepared for offshore wind farms, at the sites offshore substations are build and installed, a power export cable connects the wind farm to shore, and on shore the cable landing and land substation are established for enabling the renewable energy supply from the wind farm to the energy consumers. These activities are costly, and are expected to increase in costs as offshore wind farm sites are developed further offshore, or floating, and additional infrastructure such as offshore energy storage or offshore energy conversion to hydrogen are considered. The utilization of the infrastructure is now fully dependent on the energy in the wind. During calm weather and specifically in Spring/Summer seasons the infrastructure is idle. The infrastructure costs are therefore currently discounted over typical capacity factors of 35-55%. Offshore Solar, a rapidly developing industry with planned projects in the Hollandse Kust Noord, Hollandse Kust West, and IJmuiden Ver Beta offshore wind farms in NL (operated by utilities such as Vattenfall, CIP, Shell, Eneco, RWE, and Total Energies), can be integrated within the offshore wind farm sites and can increase the offshore grid infrastructure capacity factors up to 65% by using available area in-between the turbines for less than 5% of the total offshore wind farm surface area. This study has assessed for 5 offshore wind farm sites with different meteological patterns the anticipated increase in capacity factor by integrating offshore solar on the infrastructure. This resulted in 20-40% increases in utilization. An assessment was made based on latest grid infrastructure developments with an estimated costs of 1-2.5 BLN EUR / GW installed wind. The addition of offhsore solar is thereby estimated to save 0.2-1.0 BLN EUR / GW in grid infrastructure.