The complementarity of offshore wind and floating photovoltaics in the Belgian North Sea, an analysis up to 2100

The combination of offshore wind with floating photovoltaics (PV) presents a major opportunity to scale up renewable energy offshore. As offshore grid development is a substantial cost driver for marine renewables, making optimal use of grid connections is most desirable. The complementarity of wind and solar resources can increase common transmission loading, thereby reducing grid costs per kWh. To fully assess the benefits of solar wind hybridization, temporal resource complementarity must be evaluated on different timescales. In this work, the complementarity of offshore wind and solar energy resources is investigated for the Belgian North Sea using Kendall's tau. As climate change will affect the behavior of renewable energy resources, the analysis is extended up until 2100 for the climate representative concentration pathways 4.5 and 8.5. Significant solar-wind complementarity is found on monthly and weekly timescales, and to a lesser extent on daily, hourly and 10-minute timescales. Moreover, this complementarity is maintained under climate change. This study therefore identifies solar-wind hybridization as a sustainable option to reduce offshore grid costs per kWh.