Elevating offshore renewable energy: a study on integrating wind, solar, and storage systems

The aggregation of various renewable energy sources within an offshore energy park can maximize the use of marine space and of existing electrical infrastructure but poses the challenge of combined intermittencies and curtailment. In many places, conditions allow for offshore floating solar panels to be deployed in and around wind parks. Since 2022 these technologies have already been demonstrated in a number of offshore pilots in the North Sea and Yellow Sea. This paper investigates how solar can complement wind for a Mediterranean energy park with offshore transmission cable capacity as a constraint. The added value of energy storage is then investigated by considering various storage control strategies for different capacities of en ergy storage. It is shown that the addition of a solar capacity that equals that of installed wind power can increase the annual exported production by more than 30% without export capacity constraint and by nearly 23% when the export capacity equals the installed wind capacity.