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SCHEVENINGEN, Netherlands, Aug 25 (Reuters) – Wind turbines, floating solar panels and green hydrogen at sea are among the projects being built off the Dutch coast, as a country renowned for its water engineering expertise builds of its renewable energy infrastructure.

In a tour of the North Sea facilities on August 25, Dutch companies and equipment presented important projects.

At Hollandse Kust Zuid, a 1.5 gigawatt (GW) wind farm scheduled for completion next year, ten of the 140 turbines are already producing electricity. Sweden’s Vattenfall made headlines when it won the concession to build the farm in 2018 without government subsidies.

Electricity from the farm is converted to higher voltage and sent to the coast from a station completed in July by Dutch grid operator TenneT.

“That’s a 700 MW platform,” said TenneT CEO Manon van Beek, pointing to the HKZ “Alpha” station. Dozens like this are still under construction.

“Only here in the Netherlands we will connect more than 20 Gigawatts (of wind energy) before 2030,” he said.

Other projects include “Oceans of Energy” – a 1 megawatt (MW) cluster of floating solar panels.

The CEO, Allard van Hoeken, said the design is “not too far” from being economical, thanks to the reduced cost of solar panels. He has plans to build a series of projects of 3MW and 50MW.

On Thursday, the panels were covered by a flock of seagulls, but Van Hoeken said they were welcome.

“When some waves come, the birds leave,” he said.

In the nearby “PosHYdon” project, Neptune Energy is preparing to convert electricity into hydrogen and send it offshore through existing natural gas pipelines.

While that process is currently uneconomical, engineers believe that electricity will eventually become cheap, and it may make sense to convert some of the hydrogen for use in transportation or steelmaking.

Reporting by Toby Sterling Editing by Nick Zieminski

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