Floating solar and offshore wind projects share a challenge that onshore renewable energy does not face: the marine environment is hostile to structures, equipment, and people in ways that require fundamentally different engineering approaches. Salt corrosion attacks electrical connections within months if the wrong materials are specified. Wave action creates fatigue loading on floating structures that must be modelled and designed for over a 25-year project life. Mooring systems that work on calm reservoir surfaces fail on coastal waters with tidal variation and storm surges.
Green Ship Technologies entered the renewable energy engineering space because these challenges sit squarely within naval architecture and offshore engineering — disciplines we have been applying to ships and offshore structures for years. The physics of a floating solar platform responding to wave loads is not fundamentally different from the analysis we run on a barge or FPSO. The difference is in the specific design codes, the environmental loads at the site, and the interface with the electrical systems.
Floating Solar System Design: What the Engineering Covers
Hydrodynamic and Structural Analysis
A floating solar array is a large, relatively flexible structure operating in a dynamic water environment. The design process starts with site metocean data — wave heights, periods, and directions; wind speeds; water depth and tidal range; and current velocities. We use this to define the design load cases, then analyse the floatation system and connecting structure to ensure fatigue life, ultimate strength, and serviceability requirements are met across all conditions.
Mooring and Anchoring Design
The mooring system must hold the array on station across its full range of environmental conditions, including storm events, without transmitting loads that would damage the floatation modules or panel connections. For reservoirs and lakes, anchor blocks on the bed are typical. For coastal or estuarine locations, pile anchors or seabed anchors may be required. We design the mooring configuration, size the lines and connectors, and specify the anchoring system based on the seabed conditions at the specific site.
Corrosion and Material Specification
Aluminium structures, HDPE floats, and marine-grade stainless steel fasteners are the standard material palette for floating solar in saline environments. The selection of each component must account for galvanic corrosion between dissimilar metals, UV degradation of polymer components, and biofouling on submerged surfaces. Our specifications draw on the same corrosion engineering principles applied to ship hull coatings and offshore structure cathodic protection.
Offshore Wind Engineering: Where Marine Expertise Is Essential
Offshore wind turbine foundations represent some of the most demanding fatigue design problems in civil engineering. A monopile foundation for a 15MW turbine in 30m water depth is subjected to wave and current loading millions of times over its design life, combined with the dynamic forces from the rotating turbine above. The structural analysis requires soil-structure interaction modelling, fatigue life assessment per DNV standards, and detailed corrosion allowance calculations.
Our Offshore Wind Scope of Work
- Site assessment, bathymetric survey review, and metocean data analysis
- Turbine array layout optimisation accounting for wake losses and cable routing
- Monopile, jacket, tripod, and gravity-base foundation design and analysis
- Inter-array and export cable route engineering
- Marine operations planning — installation vessel specification and lifting analysis
- Sea fastening design for turbine component transportation
Why Naval Architecture Expertise Matters for Renewable Energy Projects
Renewable energy developers often discover late in a project that their civil engineering contractors lack the specific skills to design marine foundation interfaces, analyse transport loads for offshore equipment, or model the dynamic behaviour of floating structures. Bringing in Green Ship Technologies at the concept stage means these gaps are identified and addressed before they become programme-critical problems. We combine offshore engineering, structural analysis, and marine operations planning in one team.
