Abstract
A 600 MW offshore wind farm is under construction in the Netherlands Exclusive Economic Zone at a site called Gemini situated 55 km north of the Wadden Sea island of Schiermonnikoog and 85 km from the nearest Dutch port of Eemshaven. This chapter investigates the option of introducing a multi-use design for the Gemini site by adding mussel cultivation (48 kt wet weight per year) and seaweed cultivation (480 kt wet weight per year) to the wind farm. An institutional analysis indicates a political will in the Netherlands to support the development of adding uses to offshore wind farms, but a number of implementation obstacles are also identified. Those obstacles include an absence of licences for multi-use production and legal restrictions against third-party access to wind farms. There is therefore a need for a regulatory framework for multi-use and trust-building among actors involved in multi-use installations. A financial and economic assessment, and a cost-benefit analysis also taking into account monetized changes in CO2 emissions, indicate that adding mussel cultivation to the wind farm is likely to be both financially and socio-economically viable. Including a seaweed cultivation function is probably not financially and socio-economically viable under current technical and economic conditions. Knowledge gaps and uncertainties in these assessments with respect to, for example, missing site-specific data and non-monetized externalities suggest further research, also including pilot cultivations of mussels and seaweed in planned single-use or multi-use installations.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
An LCA consists of four stages; (a) objective and scope definition, (b) inventory analysis, (c) impact assessment and (d) interpretation. LCA is a standardized method which follows ISO 1040 series (ISO 2006a, b) and covers life cycle stages of a product or function. During the life cycle inventory stage, after constructing the flow chart of the product/function, for each process or activity inputs and outputs are listed with their quantities. The next step is converting emissions to the related impact categories using several methods like TRACI, CML 2001, etc.
- 3.
The capacity factor (average generated power divided by its peak power) varies between 25 and 50% roughly for Danish wind farms. For the Gemini wind farm web site this value is given as 2600 GWH/year (capacity factor of 49.5%).
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Exchange rate 0.83 $/ €.
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Söderqvist, T. et al. (2017). Socio-economic Analysis of a Selected Multi-use Offshore Site in the North Sea. In: Koundouri, P. (eds) The Ocean of Tomorrow. Environment & Policy, vol 56. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55772-4_4
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