Offshore electricity generation potential and its integration into the energy system of an energy self-sufficient island: a case study of Iceland

World and Europe’s climate emergency and renewable electricity production are a central topic for present and future energy security and carbon emission strategies, requiring strong efforts to governments and industries for their achieving.

Diversification in the mix of sources providing electricity is getting more crucial day after day. Among the many possibilities, offshore generation has seen an outstanding increase in the last twenty years, in particular in those areas where wind, solar and wave data performance enables to reach high capacity factors and where landuse is a sensitive topic for protected onshore areas and biodiversity, especially for the islands.

In particular, floating generation in the last few years has dragged the attention of investors and governments for its potential and positive implications, from technical, economic and employment perspectives. Floating Offshore Wind Farms (FOWF), after years of studies and prototypes, are now an actual feasibile source, showing tens of projects under development and approval phases in the Mediterranean areas and in the Nordic regions, showing their great potential. Furthermore, the coupling of these technologies with other energy generation forms, like solar photovoltaic and wave kinds, and storages, as electrochemical and hydrogen ones, could contribute to reach a more complete, stable and economically efficient system.

In this context, Iceland’s energy systems relies on about 70% out of its total electricity generation from hydroelectric plants, followed by almost 30% from geothermal source, and less than 1% from wind, solar and fossil-fuel production. Moreover, it is the European country with the highest share of renewables in final energy consumption, scoring a value around 82%. Nevertheless, grid shortages, blackouts, houses not connected to the national grid, peaks of demand from energy-intensive factories, unpredicable events, force the use of carbon-based fuels to cope with lacks of electricity, mainly diesel ones. This requires an improvement in the variety of sources of generation and storage, aiming at a 100% renewable scenario. Focus of this work is to analyze the Icelandic energy mix and investigate the possibility of implementation of offshore electricity generation and storages, and the expected effects on this energy self-sufficient island. Furthermore, the study considers the environmental impacts and the grade of public acceptance towards these technologies. Eventually, a comparison with the Mediterranea island of Malta provides more completeness to the research work.