Trio plan half-gigawatt floating wind-solar hybrid off Italy
Trio plan half-gigawatt floating wind-solar hybrid off Italy | Windpower Monthly
A trio of developers have unveiled plans for a large-scale hybrid project combining floating solar PV panels and floating offshore wind turbines off the coast of southern Italy.
Floating solar project manufacturer SolarDuck, Italian asset manager Green Arrow Capital, and renewables developer New Developments plan to combine a 420MW floating wind farm with a 120MW floating solar array off the coast of Calabria in southern Italy.
They claim the project in the Gulf of Taranto would harness the complementary nature of wind and solar resources, which typically peak at different hours of the day.
Green Arrow CEO Giovanni Guzzo said that the developers are currently awaiting permitting approval for the project and believe it could come online in 2028.
SolarDuck’s elevated platform technology allows solar PV panels to be deployed in significant wave heights. It is due to build a 5MW pilot project at RWE’s Hollandse Kust West VII wind farm in a bid to demonstrate the robustness of its solution and enable the scaling of the technology to accelerate its adoption.
Related Knowledge Center: Offshore wind energy
Over the next decade, U.S. offshore wind power is expected to grow from a single 30-megawatt wind farm off Rhode Island to more than 2,000 MW of capacity along the Atlantic Seaboard. There are contracts for wind power off the coasts of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Maryland, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Virginia.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory has estimated the United States has over 4,000 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind potential, enough to power the country four times over.
The growth in part being spurred by state solicitations, including in New York, where then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) set a commitment of 9,000 MW of offshore wind by 2035, and in Connecticut, where in June 2021, Gov. Ned Lamont (D) signed legislation authorizing the construction of 2,000 MW of offshore wind by 2030.
The offshore development is also being driven by an investment tax credit set to end in December 2019 and is equal to 12 percent of expenditures. U.S. Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Tom Carper (D-Del.) have introduced a bill to extend the tax credit for up to eight years.
The Interior Department has held eight competitive lease sales that resulted in 15 offshore wind leases over 1.7 million acres that has the potential for 21 GW of capacity. In February 2022, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management completed a bidding process that realized $4.37 billion for 488,000 acres across six lease areas in federal waters off New York and New Jersey.
Projects have also been proposed off the Southeast coast, off California and Hawaii, and for the Great Lakes.