www.marin.nl/markets/renewables
‘ The main challenge is to further decrease electricity costs while increasing total capacity’
MARIN believes it is our responsibility to contribute to the development of offshore renewable energy from waves, tides and wind. Back in 2010, we already established the Renewable Energy Team (RENT), a MARIN-wide team of specialists covering all the aspects needed to make offshore renewable energy a success.
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esides being active in wave and tidal energy, the RENT team is involved in the hydrodynamic
design of fixed and floating offshore wind turbines and wind turbine installation and maintenance vessels, for which the challenges are very similar to those of the offshore industry: a safe and economic design, enabling the highest productivity rates possible.
In the early days, the RENT team’s main involvement was in the area of wave energy and jack-up installation vessels for the offshore wind sector, explains Erik- Jan De Ridder, Team Leader RENT and
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coordinator for the Renewables market. However, this rapidly progressed to mainly focusing on offshore wind. “This was largely driven by the dramatic reduction in the costs of offshore wind energy, making it an affordable renewable energy source, especially for Northern Europe. The cost reduction was a result of economies of scale as the turbines grew from 2MW to the 12MW turbines of today, and secondly because the operational costs during installation and maintenance were lowered by introducing tailor-made installation and Operations & Maintenance (O&M) vessels,” he says.
Constant strive to reduce electricity costs The main challenge for offshore renewable energy currently is to further decrease its electricity costs, while increasing its total capacity, Erik-Jan adds. Although the offshore renewable energy market can build on the knowledge from the oil & gas industry, it also has its own specific challenges, he says, such as the constant strive to reduce the cost of energy, but also the necessary scaling up so that it can be a major clean energy contributor to our overall energy need. “For this it will need to increase its capacity and going further offshore of course adds to the complexity of the
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