Wave Energy Scotland (WES) has recently released a report commissioned from OWC that explores the potential benefits of sharing infrastructure, supply chain, and services between floating wind farms and wave energy developments. The report highlights that sharing these resources can lead to significant cost reductions, with the levelised cost of energy (LCOE) for wind potentially reduced by up to 7% and for wave energy by up to 40%. Furthermore, the combined LCOE of a shared project could be up to 12% lower than in separate developments.
The report offers insights into a range of sharing scenarios and suggests that cost reductions are available to both wind and wave technologies without requiring fully hybrid platforms, which are considered too high-risk at present. The report also highlights two potential wave scale-up pathways, depending on technology type. Wave devices can be integrated by clustering individual megawatt-scale devices between floating wind turbines, or by mounting numerous devices on a versatile floating platform that shares the supply chain and manufacturing processes with floating wind substructures.
The report's findings provide a promising starting point for cross-sector discussions, and WES is calling for further dialogue to explore the opportunities that sharing infrastructure, supply chain, and services between floating wind and wave energy developments could bring. WES Managing Director Tim Hurst believes that the report's conclusions support the launch of a more detailed feasibility study, and Jonathan Hodges, WES innovation and strategy manager, added that bringing wave and wind energy together could reduce the cost of energy, increase the local content of projects, and deliver a world-leading wave energy industry.
The potential benefits of increased collaboration between the Scottish wind and wave energy sectors are also significant. Scotland is currently creating a vast supply chain and services network to support the offshore wind capacity leased through the ScotWind program, and collaboration between the wind and wave sectors could bring further technical and socioeconomic benefits. It could also enhance national energy security by creating a more-varied generation portfolio.
The report highlights the potential for sharing infrastructure, supply chain, and services between floating wind farms and wave energy developments to reduce the levelised cost of energy and bring a range of technical, socioeconomic, and environmental benefits. As such, further cross-sector dialogue and exploration of this opportunity is needed to determine how this can be leveraged to support the growth of renewable energy and accelerate the transition to a low-carbon economy.
