Equinor Flirts with Floating Solar
Summary - Equinor will explore opportunities within the realm of floating solar power. Together with Moss Maritime the company wants to start testing near the island of Frøya in the late summer of 2021. The plant will measure 6400 m2 and rise 3 meters above sea level and appears to be made of interlinked rigid structures.
This is what the pilot plant may look like. (Illustration: Moss Maritime)
“If we succeed here, we can succeed anywhere”
The North Sea is a notoriously dangerous place. This has been known since the Viking age, and it is acknowledged by many to be one of the roughest places in the world to operate in. Hence the above quote from Hanne Wigum, head of the Equinor technology unit focusing on wind and solar power. She puts in words one of the main maxims of the offshore industry: if it works in the North Sea, it works pretty much anywhere.
So what is it exactly that Equinor wants to do?
The plan is to build a floating pilot plant off the island of Frøya near Trondheim in the late summer of 2021. Equinor claims it is set to become the world’s first pilot plant for floating solar power in rough waters, although Oceans of Energy has already dipped their floating-solar-toe in the water over the last few years. Nonetheless, an energy major such as Equinor validating and experimenting with this technology is an important signal to the outside world and a proud moment for the stakeholders involved, not in the very least the local communities.
The municipality of Frøya has been positive to and is involved in the planning of the pilot plant. Equinor has filed an application with the Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate. Planned to measure 80 m x 80 m, the plant will tower less than 3 metres over the sea surface. The pilot will be tested for a minimum one year in collaboration with Moss Maritime.
The pilot plant will be an important milestone for Moss Maritime as well. “We have been working on this concept for the past three years, most recently through our partnership with Equinor, and the concept has been substantially matured, both technically and economically. The floating pilot plant will be an important step on the road towards technology commercialization, and an important arena for further development and optimization of the concept,” says Alexander Thøgersen, vice president, engineering, at Moss Maritime.
Hanne Wigum, head of the Equinor technology unit focusing on wind and solar power.
The location of the island of Frøya on the map.
Testing resilience, not power output
Why would you test solar energy off the coast of Norway, which has one of the harshest environments in the world and on top of that, is dark for months at a time? It is not to determine how much energy can be produced.
It is exactly because of the rough seas that it is being tested here. The key purpose of the pilot is to test how weather conditions affect the floating solar plant.
The Norwegian coast and continental shelf are world-class when it comes to oil, gas and wind, but when it comes to sun, other regions offer better conditions. As a testing grounds, Frøya is very suitable. “The municipality of Frøya has been a good collaboration partner for us. We have reached an agreement with the grid owner, allowing the electricity that is produced to enter the power grid on Frøya. In addition, the nearness to our research centre in Trondheim, and the expertise possessed by the Sintef and NTNU research institutions, represent an advantage for us,” says Wigum.
Frøya mayor Kristin Furunes Strømskag looks forward to the further collaboration. “It is very exciting that Frøya has been chosen as the host municipality for the testing of new renewable energy sources, such as solar power. With our natural conditions, we are a good location for a full-scale pilot plant within research and development”, she says.
And those developments are accelerating.
Rapid development
This is the third research project that Equinor is involved in. Equinor operates a project off Sri Lanka, a concept in more calmer waters that does aim to determine how to produce as much energy as possible. In addition, Equinor is involved in a project in the Netherlands where three different floating solar power concepts are being tested on a lake. These projects provide important knowledge about not just resilience, but also predictability of energy production under rougher conditions than in other current production sites for floating solar power.
“We choose to perform several research projects in parallel because of the rapid growth within renewable energy. This enables us to acquire optimal knowledge about this as early as possible”, says Hanne Wigum. Equinor has not made any decision on the production of power from floating photovoltaic panels, besides the research projects.
Nonetheless, the fact remains that offshore solar offers amazing opportunities in not just power production, but also the production of green hydrogen. Equinor showing commitment towards this technology might just be the catalyzer that is needed to kickstart large-scale projects.
References & Further Reading
Mr. Sustainability - Insights in Floating Solar
Equinor - Will test floating solar off Frøya
Equinor - Solar Energy in Equinor
Oceans of Energy - Projects