Italian developer aims to pair green hydrogen with floating offshore wind

An Italian company specialising in producing green hydrogen using renewable energy sources has applied for a maritime concession to build a 675 MW floating offshore wind farm in the Strait of Sicily.

The Puglia-based HOPE Group (Gruppo HOPE) has applied for a 30-year maritime concession to install 45 floating wind turbines with an individual output of 15 MW in the stretch of the sea indicatively between the island of Malta and the municipality of Pozzallo, Sicily.

The developer has used the Vestas V236-15.0 MW wind turbine as the point of reference in the project documentation.

The project is located between 23 kilometres and 40.5 kilometres off the coast of Pozzallo.

The wind farm will also feature a floating offshore substation which will be connected to the wind turbines via 66 kV inter-array cables.

The electricity generated at the wind farm will be collected at the offshore substation and then transformed to 400 kV prior to being delivered to a 150 MW onshore hydrogen plant and to the national grid via 400 kV export cables.

The export cables will make landfall at Maganuco beach in Modica near the port of Pozzallo.

The HOPE (Hydrogen Of PEople) Group has been established by Nelke, Gardill, Ilirm, Engeo, and Basomaso. Its main activity is the integration of green hydrogen into the renewables industry.

The HOPE Group said that it is currently developing a pipeline of projects in onshore wind, offshore wind, photovoltaics with a combined capacity of over 2 GW.

The company is collaborating with academic and research institutions such as the Technical University of Bari, and Scotland’s University of Strathclyde on the development of the portfolio.

The University of Strathclyde and the HOPE Group are collaborating on the development of the floating foundations for the project. The study and design activity carried out started with a preliminary comparative analysis of the existing types of floating foundations, and ended with an initial selection based on the level of technological maturity and the degree of compatibility with the depths of the water in the chosen site.

The initial studies have identified the Damping Pool foundations, and semi-submersible floating foundations such as those used on the Windfloat Atlantic 1 wind farm, as possible options to be used on the wind farm.

Several developers have so far revealed plans to build floating offshore wind farms in the Strait of Sicily, including Hexicon; Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, Nice Technology, and 7 Seas Wind Power; Renexia, Np Pozzallo Wind s.r.l.; and Wind Energy Pozzallo.

Wind Energy Pozzallo, directly managed by the Italian renewable energy developer Blunova that is owned by the Carlo Maresca SpA Group, plans to build a 975 MW floating wind farm offshore Pozzallo. The portion of the electricity produced at the wind farm could also be used to produce green hydrogen, according to the project’s technical documentation.