During the WindEurope conference in Bilbao 20-22 March, WavEC Offshore Renewables presented the poster ‘Learning rates for the development and scale-up of hybrid offshore wind systems’ for the EU-SCORES project. The poster emphasizes the potential of hybrid farms to enhance the consistency and profile of energy generation. It highlights their potential to improve energy generation consistency and reduce the Levelized Cost of Energy (LCoE) by up to 12%.

The research introduces component-based learning curves to analyze cost reductions from deploying shared marine renewable energy (MRE) technology. It suggests cost savings from the shared supply chain, logistics, consenting activities, and components such as export cables and moorings while operational costs can further be reduced through shared monitoring, inspections, and repairs carried out by multi-skilled technicians. Global deployment scenarios predict significant capacity increases for offshore wind, floating offshore wind, offshore floating solar, and wave energy by 2050, with floating offshore wind and offshore floating solar expected to commercialize by 2030.

The study concludes that integrating MRE technologies with offshore wind can offer substantial LCoE reductions and highlights the need for accurate capacity and LCoE benchmarking for future growth and cost predictions due to large variations in costs and expected deployment scenarios. A detailed white paper on this research is to be published in June.