Offshore floating solar company SolarDuck and the Maritime Research Institute Netherlands (MARIN) have been awarded a €3.2m (US$3.65m) subsidy from the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO) for the Steady Seas research program. The project will advance the foundational design of SolarDuck’s Offshore Floating Power & Utility Hub (OFPH), a single-platform offshore solar solution developed to provide reliable power, communications and other utilities to remote offshore and subsea assets.
As offshore energy activity moves further from shore, the need for reliable in-field power is becoming increasingly important. Subsea oil and gas infrastructure, carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects, offshore monitoring systems and other remote assets often depend on long subsea cables, umbilicals or local generation using diesel generators. These solutions can be costly, complex to install, vulnerable to damage and carbon intensive.
Developed to provide an alternative solution, SolarDuck’s OFPH is a redeployable offshore platform that generates renewable power where it is needed. The OFPH also supports continuous operations through integrated energy storage and auxiliary systems. This has the potential to reduce the lifecycle costs of CCS and subsea tie-back projects and consequently unlock investment opportunities.
Steady Seas builds on the operational experience and data gathered through SolarDuck’s DEI+ Merganser project in the Dutch North Sea. Under the new program, SolarDuck will lead the overall OFPH design and system integration. MARIN will contribute hydrodynamic analysis, simulations, and basin testing to validate the platform’s behavior, reliability and wave response under realistic offshore conditions. The results will support the next step toward demonstration projects with offshore industry partners.
The Steady Seas project combines applied research and technology development to address key technical questions for the OFPH, including hydrodynamic performance, mooring and motion behavior, integration of power and communication systems and the interface with subsea infrastructure.
The program will translate lessons from earlier offshore solar pilots into a robust basic design for a sector-specific platform that can support offshore oil and gas, carbon capture and storage and other remote offshore applications.
“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,” said Don Hoogendoorn, CTO of SolarDuck. “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.”
Following completion of the research phase, SolarDuck intends to move towards demonstration in collaboration with industry partners. Joint industry projects are currently being established to test the OFPH in operational offshore conditions and validate its ability to power and control remote assets in real-life environments.