Abstract
The growing global energy demand increases the need for renewable energy sources. This increase requires land to be occupied, competing with other activities such as agriculture and residency. In such a situation, renewable energy sources expand to other environments like the ocean. However, this new scene poses some challenges, such as the effect of waves on photovoltaic (PV) performance. Consequently, this study aims to evaluate the power output of an Offshore Floating PV (OFPV) system located in the North Sea considering the effect of the waves. A 3D mechanical movement model, which has been validated with data from a real system, is developed for this purpose. A sensitivity analysis is conducted to determine how the size of fluctuations depends on the dimensions of the floater. The main outcome is that a heavy and wide floater aligned with the most common wind direction reduces angle variations. Results from DC power simulations show that sea fluctuations have a negative yet small influence on PV power production. Over the course of the year, these losses amount to just 0.1% of the annual energy yield. However, a hypothetical optimally-tilted PV system placed on water would still generate 14.6% more DC power output than the floating one. On the AC side, laboratory experiments show that these oscillations negatively affect the inverter efficiency during rough sea conditions by a decrease of over 2 percentage points compared to a still system.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 117897 |
| Number of pages | 14 |
| Journal | Energy Conversion and Management |
| Volume | 300 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2024 |
Funding
Funding Information:The research leading to these results has received funding from the Horizon 2020 Program , under Grant Agreement 952957 , Trust-PV project. Additionally, it has been developed as part of the EU-SCORES project, funded by the European Commission through the Horizon-2020 Green Deal program of CINEA. The authors are very thankful to Oceans of Energy, in particular to Dora de Jong and Álvaro de Gruijter, who were instrumental in the data collection phase, both on the selection (jointly with TU Delft) and procurement of sensors as well as the physical installation and data gathering offshore. The measured values reported in Fig. 8 of this contribution were prepared by Álvaro de Gruijter as part of his MSc thesis “Design and integration of an offshore off-grid system and an on-land system for comparison on photovoltaic performance”, supervised by TU Delft.
Keywords
- Floating photovoltaics
- Inverter efficiency
- Offshore
- Waves effect
- Yield assessment
