The Port of Valencia just received an infrastructure that marks a turning point in the race for offshore renewable energy in our country. This is ‘Paiporta’, the first marine solar platform in Spain, which marks an engineering milestone by opening the door to generating renewable energy taking advantage of the entire marine area.
It has already arrived. The project is promoted by the Spanish startup BlueNewables, with the support of Naturgy. After being built in the San Enrique shipyard, in Vigo, the structure has arrived to anchor outside the southern contradock of the Valencian site and begin its imminent testing phase. which will tell us if these types of installations are truly efficient for our electrical system.
A great challenge. Taking photovoltaic technology to the open sea is not an easy task, since the continuous waves, extreme salinity and oceanic winds require very different solutions than those we see in terrestrial plants where the plate remains static, at least.
To solve this challenge, the platform uses an innovative catamaran-type design optimized for the ocean environment. The advantage that this system offers is that it allows the use of more efficient floats and the panels to be placed at a higher height above sea level. This improves overall system performance and facilitates maintenance by better protecting equipment from the sea surface.
Your generation system. One of the great characteristics of this system is that the panels generate energy not only with the direct solar radiation they receive from the sun, but also by capturing the light reflected on the sea water itself, which increases its efficiency.
But also, ‘Paiporta’ is only the first half of the project, since this initial unit has 500 kW of power, but it is expected that a second unit will arrive at the end of summer to complete the installation and reach the megawatt of total power.
A small nuance. Although they tell us that this is the first marine solar platform in Spain, the reality is that it is the first on a pre-commercial scale. This means that in 2023 a first prototype will be tested in the same port in order to begin conducting experiments on its viability. Now, the arrival of ‘Paiporta’ means taking the big leap from that basic test bed to a mature infrastructure that is almost ready to be commercialized.
A legal labyrinth. Getting to this point has not been an easy path for these companies, since Spain has had to create a clear regulatory framework to organize ocean energy. Specifically, this regulation comes from a Royal Decree published in 2024 that regulates the production of electrical energy from renewable sources in facilities located at sea.
This is the strongest regulatory reference today, since it dictates how projects subject to competitive competition should be processed compared to purely innovative ones, setting the rules of the game.
Two years of exam. The platform project in Valencia has subsidies from the IDAE, financed by NextGeneration EU European funds, and is part of the Renmarinas Valenciaport program. The objective of the Port Authority is twofold, since, on the one hand, they want to move towards emissions-neutral ports and, on the other, they also want to convert their waters into a permanent testing platform for marine technologies.
From now on, Naturgy and BlueNewables have a two-year monitoring period ahead of them. During this time, they will collect and share critical data on performance, operation, maintenance costs and potential technical issues. Only through this examination in real conditions will we know if floating ocean photovoltaics are prepared to accompany offshore wind in the energy revolution of the Spanish coast or if it remains an attempt that has gone wrong.
Images | Naturgy
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