Home Marine Energy Floating solar market will be as big as onshore solar sector, says Oceans of Energy CEO
January 15, 2024,
by
Nadja Skopljak
The industry needs to start shifting its focus from wind farms to energy farms as we have limited space which we need to make use of in an efficient way. A synergy of offshore wind and floating solar is the way to go. “If you only fill 20% of wind farm space with floating solar, you can already double the amount of energy that this energy farm gives over the year, and if you use more of the space, you can go up to five times more energy per year of the same area of the sea,” according to Allard van Hoeken, Founder and CEO of Oceans of Energy.
Navingo BV
Moderated by Simon Stark, CTO for the Dutch Marine Energy Center (DMEC), the Multi-Source Offshore Energy Parks: Paving the Way session at Offshore Energy Exhibition & Conference 2023 in Amsterdam focused on how an offshore energy park performs if different sources are combined, as well as how the energy system can look in the future if we can use all the innovations.
Don Hoogendoorn, Co-Founder and CTO of SolarDuck, believes that it is important to start focusing on energy farms and not only on wind farms as we have limited space so we need to make use of it efficiently. This requires a bit of a mind shift in the government and shareholders. Speaking about the Netherlands, Hoogendoorn expects that the combination will include solar, wind and energy storage to create a stable grid for the future of the Dutch economy.
Van Hoeken said that the benefit of having both offshore wind and floating solar is that we have more continuous electricity coming from the sea to the shore: “Together you have more continuity and much better use of the infrastructure, those cables are already paid for now and they all go all the way to the offshore farms, but they are not used all of the time. So adding solar and storage will actually mean much better utilization of the same cable that is already there.”
-
Posted: 8 months ago
Daniel Buhagiar, CEO and Co-Founder of FLASC B.V., mentioned that the co-location aspect in FLASC’s case offers the advantage of scheduling the output, first making it more stable, but then also making it better match the demand because demand is something that also is available in itself.
The panelists emphasized the vast opportunities floating solar brings to the industry, with Hoogendoorn stating that it has a number of advantages compared to offshore wind: “The nice thing about solar is that it is very scalable, much more scalable than offshore wind. So of course, it takes a while to get there,
» …
Read More rnrn