The future increase of renewable energies in the energy mix of all countries will contribute, on one hand, to the reduction of emissions from electricity production, and on the other hand, to energy supply security by exploiting available and free resources in the territories and marine areas of each country. To achieve the challenging decarbonization goals, a significant exploitation of wind and solar resources is foreseen in Italy, considering also the expansion to offshore areas, which, especially in the South, present a high potential not yet exploited.

Offshore wind is the most mature technology, although there are currently no large installations, but given the large size of the plants, possible overproductions are expected. To mitigate this, “offshore hybrid systems” have been considered, i.e., parks exploiting multiple renewable sources combined with storage systems and/or hydrogen production plants, which also have the advantage of potentially reducing costs and increasing the exploitation of a given marine area.

Technical and economic analyses have already been conducted on offshore wind in combination with wave energy device parks and hydrogen production plants. This report describes the methods and results of the technical-economic evaluation of the combination of offshore wind and storage, and offshore wind and floating photovoltaic in five study sites representative of Italian marine areas. In the Boa MOBI site in the Sicilian Channel, an analysis of combined production from three offshore renewable sources: wind, sun, and wave motion, was also conducted.

The main value of the study lies in the development of a methodology that allows for parametric analysis of performance and costs. Regarding the results, although subject to high uncertainty, LCOE evaluations show encouraging projected values in the commercial and mature phase of the considered technologies.

The Report is available on the Italian site