Floating solar technology developer SolarDuck and the Maritime Research Institute Netherlands (MARIN) have secured a EUR3.2-million (US$3.64-million) grant for their Steady Seas research project from RVO, the Netherlands Enterprise Agency.

Their goal is to advance the foundational design of SolarDuck’s Offshore Floating Power & Utility Hub (OFPH) to provide power, communications and other utilities to remote offshore and subsea facilities.

Subsea oil and gas infrastructure, carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects, and offshore monitoring systems typically import power through long subsea cables and umbilicals, or use more local diesel generators. 

All can be expensive and complex to install, vulnerable to damage and carbon-intensive, according to SolarDuck.

The OFPH provides a redeployable offshore platform that generates renewable power where needed. It is also designed for continuous operations via its integrated energy storage and auxiliary systems.

This can potentially reduce the life-cycle costs of subsea tieback and CCS projects, the company added.

Steady Seas builds on the operational experience of SolarDuck’s DEI+ Merganser project in the Dutch North Sea. SolarDuck will lead the OFPH design and system integration, while MARIN performs hydrodynamic analysis, simulations and basin testing to confirm the platform’s behavior, reliability and wave response under "realistic" offshore conditions.

The next step would be demonstration projects with offshore industry partners in real, operational offshore conditions to power and control remote assets.

The joint program will also factor in experience with previous offshore solar pilots to strengthen the OFPH design for wide-ranging offshore applications.

“The technical challenges of powering assets far offshore are significant, from mooring and motion behavior to integration with subsea infrastructure," SolarDuck CTO Don Hoogendoorn said in a June 25 LinkedIn post by the company. “This program gives us the means to engineer and validate robust answers before the solution is deployed at sea.”

MARIN's William Otto added, “MARIN will investigate the impact of the topology on behavior and hydrodynamic coefficients, and it will assess the impact of extreme wave conditions on structural loading, including wave buildup beneath the platform. This kind of rigorous, test-driven validation is essential to bring offshore solar technology confidently toward commercial deployment.”