Portable energy storage at sea

Is Subsea energy storage a viable alternative to floating onboard energy storage?

Subsea energy storage is an emerging and promising alternative to conventional floating onboard energy storage. In this review, various potential subsea electricity and hydrogen energy storage solutions for ‘floating offshore wind + hydrogen’ are examined and compared.

What is subsea battery energy storage?

Subsea battery energy storage is one such promising solution. Modular Li-ion battery energy storage systems are deployed on the seabed and connected to floating wind turbines and offshore platforms via flexible cables. The seawater can effectively transfer and store the heat generated by the battery energy storage system.

Why should energy storage systems be deployed on the seabed?

Third, the ocean provides an ideal heat sink and seawater with near-constant temperature is an ideal heat transfer medium, thereby facilitating heat management of energy storage systems. Certainly, it will be more complex to deploy energy storage systems onto the seabed.

Could Subsea energy storage be an enabler for 'floating offshore wind + hydrogen'?

Subsea energy storage remains the weakest link in the integration of ‘floating offshore wind + hydrogen + subsea energy storage’ due to the relatively low TRLs. Subsea energy storage could be an enabler for ‘floating offshore wind + hydrogen’, however, it is not the only option.

Is Subsea energy storage a good investment?

After all, high security and reliability are the baseline of energy storage in ‘floating offshore wind + hydrogen’ systems. Second, additional space is necessary if the scale of the energy storage system is very large, thereby lifting the investment. In contrast, these challenges could be avoided by subsea energy storage.

Can energy storage systems be deployed on floating offshore wind & hydrogen?

Fig. 6 shows a full picture of investigated energy storage technologies in this study for enabling ‘floating offshore wind + hydrogen’. Table 3 outlines the characteristics of corresponding energy storage technologies. Overall, energy storage systems can be deployed on the floating offshore platforms or on the seabed.