| Solar power
“Showcasing SolarDuck’s robust technology in rough North Sea conditions will enable us to deploy the technology practically anywhere in the world”, said the company’s CEO Koen Burgers. “We are very pleased that we found in RWE a strong partner who shares our vision of electrifying the world with offshore floating solar. I look forward to our organisations working together to achieve just that.”
Above: Visualisation of the SolarDuck concept
Below: Floating PV at RWE’s Amer power plant in the Netherlands
Building on experience with Merganser and HKW, RWE and SolarDuck say they plan to explore new opportunities, with the objective of developing “commercial offshore floating solar parks, both stand-alone and hybrid.” SolarDuck is a Dutch-Norwegian offshore floating PV specialist with strong roots in the maritime industry. The company was established following a spin-off from Damen Shipyards (the largest shipbuilder in the Netherlands). Since then SolarDuck says it has “worked relentlessly… to ‘Electrify the world with OFPV’” and believes its technology “offers an attractive value proposition in a wide array of user cases, ranging from islands in the sunbelt to hybrid offshore parks in the North Sea, including the Netherlands.” RWE has 18 offshore wind farms in operation. Construction projects include Sofia (1.4 GW off the UK coast) and Kaskasi (342 MW off the German coast), while it has more than 10 GW of offshore wind farms under development. It sees the Netherlands as one of the key markets where it aims to further expand its renewable energy portfolio. RWE currently operates seven onshore wind farms there, with a total installed capacity of over 330 MW (RWE’s pro-rata share), with new ones under development and construction.
Floating PV at Amer
RWE has also recently commissioned its first floating PV installation, on a lake at its Amer
power plant in Geertruidenberg, in the province of Noord- Brabant. in the Netherlands. “Our Amer floating photovoltaic project is the first of its kind for RWE, adding a new, promising technology to our portfolio”, said Katja Wünschel, CEO onshore wind and solar Europe & Australia, RWE Renewables. “Realising and operating this project deepens our knowledge about the technical possibilities of floating PV, such as scalability and energy output.”
The Amer project consists of around 13 400 floating solar panels, providing an installed capacity of 6.1 MWp.
The floating PV is the latest of three solar installations at the Amer power plant. In 2018, RWE realised the first phase of Solar Park Amer, installing over 2000 PV panels with a generating capacity of 0.5 MWp on the roof of the power plant. In 2021, RWE further increased the solar capacity with the addition of ground-mounted PV, some 5760 panels. With the commissioning of the floating project, the total generating capacity of Solar Park Amer stands at 9 MWp. Roger Miesen, CEO of RWE Generation and country chair for the Netherlands said: ”With Solar Park Amer we demonstrate that it is possible to turn conventional asset sites into landmark projects that promote innovative solutions for a sustainable electricity system. The solar panels float on a lake previously used for power plant cooling water. The lake has not been used for that purpose for many decades and has no direct connection with the nearby Amer river, and is therefore ideally suited for floating panels, says RWE. To prevent the panels from drifting away in strong winds and colliding with the surrounding dike, they are anchored at 104 points to 52 concrete blocks, each weighing 4.6 t, placed at the bottom of the lake.
www.modernpowersystems.com | September 2022 | 21
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