Comparing the economic feasibility of offshore floating wind and solar photovoltaic technologies in central Mediterranean deep waters

Abstract

Malta, being a very small and densely populated island in the central Mediterranean, has little space for large scale onshore wind turbine or photovoltaic projects. Maltese territorial waters are mostly too deep for conventional offshore wind farms to be constructed save for a handful of near-shore reefs and shoals. The quest for offshore wind turbine structure designs capable of being installed in deeper waters will revolutionize prospects for offshore wind projects worldwide; but even more so in the Mediterranean region. This paper presents a preliminary engineering analysis to develop two cost-optimized offshore floating structures to support (1) a single multi-megawatt scale wind turbine and (2) a solar photovoltaic farm with the same energy production as that of the single wind turbine. The primary objective of this work is to determine the most economically feasibile option for harvesting renewable energy at sea: offshore wind or offshore solar photovoltaic energy.