Current Projects

H-Wind : Hydrogen from offshore wind (co-funded by SFI and industry partners Equinor, ESB, DP Energy and Gas Networks Ireland).

ClimAg: Multifactorial causes of fodder crises in Ireland and risks due to climate change (funded by the Irish EPA)

Re-Wind : Re-use and recycling of Decommissioned Composite Material Wind Turbine Blades (funded by Science Foundation Ireland, Department of Employment and Learning (Northern Ireland) and National Science Foundation (USA).

ClimAtt : tools for climate change attribution of extreme weather events (funded by the Irish EPA)

HyFloat1 : floating offshore wind-to-hydrogen platform with storage

Past Projects

• A Knowledge Based Approach to Calculating Turbine Availability for Large Sets of Windfarm Data (Frank O’Connor, Irish Research Council Industrial Postgraduate Fellowship), 2013-2016.
• Downtime analysis for offshore facilities (PIP project), 2014-2016.

Floating offshore wind-to-hydrogen conversion platform with embedded hydrogen storage

The potential energy that can be generated from offshore wind, particularly deep water floating offshore wind (FOW) in many countries including Ireland is very large but cannot be fully absorbed by the domestic electricity markets alone. Currently, fossil fuels (oil, natural gas and coal) still take the major shares of total energy supply. There are opportunities for FOW farms to produce electricity and hydrogen for contributing to the sustainability and security of energy supplies and reduction of GHG emissions. There are other key challenges to FOW deployment including high cost of foundations and high penetration of variable electricity. Hydrogen produced from FOW energy will require innovative storage systems. Hydrogen storage systems that are directly coupled to FOW, if closely optimised to local operating conditions, will reduce costs and increase revenues. Storing hydrogen locally at FOW turbines or farms is promising in the future but no technical studies have been reported.   

In order to initially address these challenges, the Hyfloat1 project aims at developing new concepts for FOW foundations coupled with hydrogen storage.  In which, several existing FOW foundations will be numerically assessed and modified for storing hydrogen. The FOW foundations with hydrogen stored and subject to wind turbine and hydrodynamic loads will be analysed. Hydrogen production, pumping and storage in FOW foundations will then be optimised. The Hyfloat1 project will be built upon findings from the completed EirWind and other related projects at the UCC MaREI Centre. It will also be aligned to the UCC MaREI Centre’s H-Wind project that broadly looks at hydrogen production from OWFs, customer value chain, hydrogen safety, and Irish offshore wind – hydrogen regional hubs.