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 feasibility option for harvesting

renewable energy at sea: offshore wind or offshore solar photovoltaic energy.