PitchBook分析师注：浮动风能和太阳能（英）-2023.7-10页

VIP专免

3.0 下雪了 2023-12-20 116 397.8KB 10 页免费

侵权投诉

PitchBook Data, Inc.

John Gabbert Founder, CEO

Nizar Tarhuni Vice President, Institutional

Research and Editorial

Paul Condra Head of Emerging Technology

Research

Insiuional esearch roup

nalsis

Key takeaways 1

Floating wind and solar energy

VC ecosystem

The need for floating energy 3

Geographical differences 5

Challenges and benefits: wind 6

Challenges and benefits: solar 7

Select company highlights 8

Contents

Published on July 17, 2023

Publishing

pbinstitutionalresearch@pitchbook.com

EMERGING TECH RESEARCH

Floating Wind and Solar Energy

Floating wind and solar energy technologies provide

unique benefits in certain applications

PitchBook is a Morningstar company providing the most comprehensive, most

accurate, and hard-to-find data for professionals doing business in the private markets.

Key takeaways

• The VC ecosystem for floating wind and solar technologies is small, driven by a

historically higher focus on fixed implementations and the immaturity of floating

platform technologies designed specifically for renewable energy. However, global

interest in these technologies is increasing, and the varied applications for floating

renewable energy provide opportunities for companies in this space.

• Floating wind technologies focus on offshore, deep-water implementations, but

differences in local conditions, such as water depth, wave height, and seabed

composition, affect the viability of different technologies. No single approach

is more effective than others. Floating solar, which generally leans more toward

inshore, artificial water bodies, is also varied, with multiple applications, including

municipal and industrial reservoirs and the aquaculture industry.

• Floating wind and solar technologies face some significant challenges that are

largely based on the cost premium relative to fixed designs but also on technical

difficulties with floating platforms and grid connections. Price differentials

between floating and fixed technologies are predicted to decrease as the

technologies mature—US estimates show a price premium of approximately 25%

for floating solar projects relative to fixed solar projects.1 In the US, floating wind is

estimated to have a significant price premium of 176% over fixed-bottom offshore

wind, though this is expected to decrease considerably by 2035 to just 21%.2

• Floating renewable energy technologies also provide a set of benefits, including

reduced land use; access to areas with stronger, more stable wind (in the case

of floating offshore wind); and reduced water loss from reservoirs (in the case of

floating solar installations).

John MacDonagh

Senior Analyst, Emerging

Technology

john.macdonagh@pitchbook.com

1: “Floating Photovoltaic System Cost Benchmark: Q1 2021 Installations on Artificial Water Bodies,” National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Vignesh

Ramasamy and Robert Margolis, October 2021.

2: “A Driving FORCE for Projecting Offshore Wind Energy Costs,” Department of Energy, April 13, 2023.

PitchBook Analyst Note: Floating Wind and Solar Energy

Floating wind and solar energy VC ecosystem

The floating wind and solar industries are still small relative to both terrestrial and

fixed-bottom offshore wind and solar industries. Currently, many of the largest

installations have been built by utilities such as Portugal’s EDP or by large public

companies that focus on energy and often have significant historic activity in the

oil & gas sector. The core technical challenge for floating solar and wind technology

providers lies in the floating platform, as the electricity-generating components they

support are often sourced externally. Most of the startups in this space follow this

approach, developing floating platforms themselves and then choosing appropriate

turbines or solar panels on these platforms. The startup ecosystem is very small

at present due to the cost premiums of floating technology relative to fixed-base

installations and limited demand, but interest is increasing in key regions, driven

by emissions targets and wider acknowledgment of the importance of energy

independence and resilience.

VC-backed companies focusing on floating energy are fairly evenly split between the

wind and solar categories, and Europe accounts for more than 50% of companies

in both categories. VC deal sizes tend to be somewhat low, with Principle Power’s

$20.0 million early-stage VC deal and $22.0 million late-stage VC deal being the

largest. Considering the size of the VC-backed floating wind and solar space, few

exits have been seen. In 2021, France-headquartered floating wind technology

developer Ideol was acquired by Norway-based offshore wind company BW

Offshore and went public as BW Ideol via IPO shortly after, raising $67.6 million.

BW Ideol uses a barge-type platform with a damping pool for stability and has

operating projects in both France and Japan. Other European projects are in

progress, including a partnership to develop approximately 1 GW of floating wind

energy as part of the Buchan Offshore Wind project off Scotland’s northern coast.

Hexicon is a Sweden-based developer of floating wind technology and raised $41.4

million via IPO in 2021 after several rounds of VC funding. The company has also

been expanding its project portfolio in Europe, with particularly strong development

in Italy and Sweden. Hexicon uses a multi-turbine approach, with two turbines on a

semi-submersible or a tension leg platform (TLP), depending on site conditions.

Floating wind and solar represent an opportunity for startups. The space has few

market participants, and several key regions, including the US, EU, and UK, have

announced growth in renewable energy sources, including specific growth targets

for floating energy. Europe and Asia have already begun to increase installed

capacity, and the US has held auctions for the first floating offshore wind leases.

These leases included five sites off the coast of California, four of which were

won by European companies. Further auctions for sites in Oregon and Maine are

expected in 2024. Policy support is driving adoption in several geographies, and

interest in energy resilience is also a key driver. Floating solar startups are varied

in their approaches and target applications, including municipal and industrial

reservoirs and aquaculture. The US has particularly strong potential for floating

solar growth due to its high number of viable sites.3

3: “Energy Production and Water Savings From Floating Solar Photovoltaics on Global Reservoirs,” Nature Sustainability, Yubin Jin, et al., March 13,

2023.

The US has particularly

strong potential for floating

solar growth due to its high

number of viable sites.

PitchBook Analyst Note: Floating Wind and Solar Energy

Technologies for floating platforms are highly varied, and the most suitable

technology will depend on the use case. Startups tend to focus on a single design,

and this provides space for a diverse range of approaches in floating wind and

solar markets. Since floating platforms’ energy generation technology is typically

from third parties, startups developing floating platforms are potential targets

for partnerships or acquisition to expand the offerings of companies providing

renewable energy hardware or fixed-bottom renewable projects.

The need for floating energy

Clean energy efforts have been growing globally as nations have announced climate

goals and the cost of low-carbon energy technologies has fallen. Additionally,

recent geopolitical events have highlighted the importance of energy security,

which renewable energy can provide. In some situations, the levelized cost of

energy (LCOE) for renewable energy technologies is now cost-competitive with

conventional fossil-fuel-based approaches, and utility-scale solar and wind energy

are among the cheapest options, particularly when taking government subsidies

into account.4, 5 For both solar- and wind-based electricity generation, total costs

vary greatly depending on factors such as the local climate, existing connections

to power grids, land costs, and materials costs. Of these, utility-scale terrestrial

installations generally have the lowest LCOE. Interest in community and residential

renewable energy has increased, but these applications have a much higher LCOE

relative to large-scale installations.

Though terrestrial installations represent the lowest cost of all wind and solar

projects, there is also a growing desire for water installations—particularly

for offshore wind projects. Although they have a slightly higher LCOE, these

installations contend less with aesthetic problems and higher land costs. Existing

designs for fixed-bottom offshore wind technology allow wind farms to be

constructed in water up to a depth of about 200 feet, which provides plenty

of additional sites for regions that have substantial continental shelf, but in

locations where water depth increases more rapidly, offshore wind must rely on

floating technologies.

Floating platforms have a long history in the oil & gas industry for exploration and

production purposes, and the development of these technologies forms the basis of

floating offshore wind turbine (FOWT) designs, which are often separated by their

stabilization method:6

4: LCOE is a measure of the average cost of electricity generation over the installation’s lifetime, including initial capital costs, operation and

maintenance, and fuel costs, where appropriate. Essentially, LCOE is equal to the sum of costs over the asset’s lifetime, divided by the total electricity

generated.

5: “Lazard’s Levelized Cost of Energy Analysis—Version 16.0,” Lazard, April 2023.

6: “Critical Review of Floating Support Structures for Offshore Wind Farm Deployment,” Journal of Physics: Conference Series, Mareike Leimeister, et

al., 2018.

资料加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载资料到电脑，查找使用更方便

立即下载 VIP免费下载

本资料由有户自行上传，仅供个人参考学习使用（禁止商用）。任何个人或组织，在未征得本站同意时，禁止复制、盗用、采集、发布本站内容到任何网站、书籍等各类媒体平台。如若本内容侵犯了原著者的合法权益，可联系我们进行处理。

PitchBook分析师注：浮动风能和太阳能（英）-2023.7-10页.pdf

共10页,预览3页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

PitchBook分析师注：浮动风能和太阳能（英）-2023.7-10页

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

推荐作者

热门标签

举报选择: