One of the world's largest offshore wind power plants with 759 MW installed capacity off the Netherlands' coast, the Hollandse Kust Noord Offshore Wind Park being built by a joint venture between Shell and Eneco, is to also host an offshore floating solar farm to be installed by Oceans of Energy.
The Dutch offshore solar power company was picked by CrossWind to install and operate solar panels within the offshore wind turbines, with a view to increase the utilization of the offshore power grid infrastructure.
Oceans of Energy says it will be the world's 1st offshore solar farm to be installed within a wind farm in high wave conditions. It hopes the project will set an example for more combined offshore wind and solar parks in the future.
The Dutch company claims its in-house developed modular solar system can withstand waves as high as 13 meters in rough sea conditions for a long time. TaiyangNews reached out to Oceans of Energy to determine the installed capacity of this offshore solar farm for CrossWind project, but till the time of this story going online, we hadn't heard back.
Founder and CEO of Oceans of Energy Allard van Hoeken said, "We will add offshore solar to offshore wind. Our performance and our system will be key for the success of the innovational part of the offshore wind farm."
Located around 18.5 km off the coast of the province of North Holland, Hollandse Kust project is also being developed as the 1st wind park globally to have an offshore combination of battery storage and round-trip green hydrogen produced from an offshore wind power plant on a MW scale.
Shell and Eneco won the tender to build this project at Hollandse Kust (west) in December 2022 saying it will generate enough renewable power to decarbonize about 3% of the current Dutch electricity demand.
Their joint venture CrossWind has started building the wind project that's to have 69 turbines of 11 MW each, situated over 1 km from each other. Electricity cable connecting the wind farm to the offshore power socket will be installed by transmission system operator TenneT. On completion, it is expected to generate 3.3 TWh annually. It is scheduled to come online by the end of 2023, while the offshore solar farm will be switched on in 2025.
Oceans of Energy is also building a 3 MW offshore solar farm under European Union (EU) funded European Scalable Offshore Renewable Energy Sources (EU-SCORES), co-located with a bottom fixed windfarm off the Belgian coat (see 3 MW Offshore Solar System Off Belgium Coast).