Dutch Grant Backs SolarDuck's Offshore Solar Power Hub Scheme

Dutch Grant Backs SolarDuck's Offshore Solar Power Hub Scheme

Offshore floating solar company SolarDuck and the Maritime Research Institute Netherlands (MARIN) have been awarded a $3.7 million (€3.2 million) subsidy from the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO) to advance the development of an offshore floating platform designed to provide power and utilities to remote subsea assets.

The funding will support the Steady Seas research program, which aims to develop SolarDuck's Offshore Floating Power & Utility Hub (OFPH), a single-platform offshore solar solution intended to provide power, communications and other utilities to offshore and subsea infrastructure.

The companies said the platform is designed as an alternative to long subsea cables, umbilicals and diesel-powered local generation systems that are often used to support remote offshore assets.

According to SolarDuck, the OFPH will generate renewable power at the point of use and support continuous operations through integrated energy storage and auxiliary systems, with the potential to reduce lifecycle costs for carbon capture and storage and subsea tie-back projects.

The Steady Seas program builds on operational experience and data gathered through SolarDuck's DEI+ Merganser project in the Dutch North Sea.

Under the program, SolarDuck will lead overall platform design and system integration, while MARIN will provide hydrodynamic analysis, simulations and basin testing to validate the platform's behavior, reliability and wave response under offshore conditions.

The research program will examine hydrodynamic performance, mooring and motion behavior, integration of power and communication systems and interfaces with subsea infrastructure.

"Steady Seas allows us to take the lessons learned from building and testing Merganser in the North Sea and apply them to a design tailored for single-platform offshore applications. The technical challenges of powering assets far offshore are significant, from mooring and motion behavior to integration with subsea infrastructure. This program gives us the means to engineer and validate robust answers before the solution is deployed at sea," said Don Hoogendoorn, CTO of SolarDuck.

"We are proud to continue our collaboration with SolarDuck and to support the further maturation of offshore floating photovoltaics. Within Steady Seas, MARIN will investigate the impact of the topology on behaviour and hydrodynamic coefficients, and it will assess the impact of extreme wave conditions on structural loading, including wave build-up beneath the platform. This kind of rigorous, test-driven validation is essential to bring offshore solar technology confidently toward commercial deployment," added William Otto of MARIN.

Following completion of the research phase, SolarDuck said it intends to move toward demonstration projects in collaboration with industry partners through Joint Industry Projects aimed at testing the Offshore Floating Power & Utility Hub under operational offshore conditions.