Offshore wind’s potential as a source of green hydrogen is growing, and industry leaders such as Shell, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Ørsted recognise that, David Foxwell argues. The Dutch have always been good at land reclamation. Large parts of the Netherlands are built on reclaimed land. Dutch expertise has been used to build airports on reclaimed land in Hong Kong, and to create vast holiday resorts like Palm Island in Dubai. But it is not so much the potential application of the same kind of techniques to build energy islands in the North Sea that excites me. It is what could be built on those islands. One of the things that could one day flow from the IJmuiden Ver (IJVER) project, a study looking at an offshore island providing a site for future high voltage direct current (HVDC) transformers for offshore wind, is a site for producing green hydrogen. Netherlands Minister of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy Eric Wiebes asked transmission system operator TenneT to investigate whether it would be beneficial to place HVDC transformers on an ‘energy island’ as an alternative to the more traditional solution based on fixed offshore platforms or jackets. The conclusion was that an island solution could be 10-15% less expensive than jackets, although building an island in the required timescale might be challenging.
Offshore Wind Journal 20th May 2019 read more »
